Vagaries and Vagrants
by meanwhiletimely
Summary: Tom Riddle's four most pivotal encounters in the years between his departure from England and his return a decade later as Lord Voldemort: a vampire hunter in Albania, a voodoo queen in New Orleans, a snake charmer in India, a Seer in Greece—and somewhere on the way, a transformation. Four chapters; canon-compliant.
1. The Hollow Tree

"He disappeared after leaving the school... traveled far and wide... sank so deeply into the Dark Arts, consorted with the very worst of our kind, underwent so many dangerous magical transformations, that when he resurfaced as Lord Voldemort, he was barely recognizable."  
 _— Albus Dumbledore_

 **vagary** _(noun)_ — an unpredictable instance, a wandering journey; a wild or unusual idea, desire, or action  
 **vagrant** _(noun)_ — a person who wanders from place to place

 **Chapter I: The Hollow Tree**  
1946 — Tom begins his journey in a remote Albanian village, searching for Rowena Ravenclaw's lost diadem.

 **Chapter II: The Queen of Death**  
1950 — While tracking down a remnant of the past in New Orleans, Tom finds an unexpected ally in the city's reigning voodoo queen, who is hiding some dark secrets of her own.

 **Chapter III: The Great Serpent**  
1953 — Tom arrives in India for the Nag Panchami festival of snake worship, intending to collect a rare and potent venom for a spell—and uncovers a revelation in the process.

 **Chapter IV: The Foul One**  
1956 — Tom concludes his travels in Greece, seeking the counsel of the most powerful Seer in the world... and becomes consumed with discovering the fate of Herpo the Foul, creator of the first Basilisk and inventor of the Horcrux.

* * *

We are the hollow men.  
Those who have crossed to death's other kingdom remember us.

Between the idea and the reality,  
between the motion and the act,  
falls the shadow.

— from _The Hollow Men_ by T.S. Eliot

 **Lundër, Albania — 1946**

 _A hollow tree in a forest in Albania._

As a pretty poetic picture, reflected Tom—staring out at one such forest from the window of a dim Albanian pub full of dim Albanian villagers—it was very enchanting, very evocative, very... Ravenclaw. As a practical set of directions, it was maddeningly useless.

Albania was positively _overrun_ with trees.

"Can I get you another?"

Tom tore his gaze away from the window and glanced up. The barmaid was smiling at him, leaning over the table to better display her considerable cleavage—pretty, he supposed, for an Albanian peasant girl, but not nearly pretty enough for him to find appeal in any of the lewd images he saw dancing across her mind as she looked at him. She was intrigued by him, a handsome, polished stranger in her remote rural village full of coarse farmers and coarser cousins, and his seeming disinterest had only intensified her lust—she was accustomed to men finding _her_ intriguing, too.

Withdrawing from her mind, Tom looked to his half-empty glass of _raki—_ a vile Muggle alcohol that tasted more like a rancid Dark potion. "Why don't you sit down," he said in smooth Albanian, "and help me finish this one?"

Her eyes widened in pleased surprise. "Oh—but I'm working—"

"Sit," ordered Tom with a steel edge to his voice. The girl slid into the chair across from him immediately, looking rather flushed. "I'm unfamiliar with these parts," he told her, placing his hand over hers on the table with calculated nonchalance. "Perhaps you can make me more... familiar."

The barmaid's voice hitched a little in her throat as she breathed out, "Perhaps I can."

Tom trailed light fingers up her arm. "Lundër is a fascinating name for a village. It means 'hollow tree', does it not?"

"It does," she said faintly, fixated on his fingers flitting across her skin. "I don't know why."

"I would think," said Tom, tracing her collarbone now, "a lovely town like this—filled with _such_ lovely people..." She let out a nervous little trill of a laugh. "...would have all sorts of charming local lore." He leaned closer. "No stories about the forest? No songs or ballads or legends about... hollow trees?" Helena Ravenclaw being chased across medieval Europe with that priceless crown on her head was bound to inspire _some_ sort of folkloric legacy. It was as good a start as any.

The girl furrowed her brow, thinking—something Tom suspected she did not do often. "There is one," she said slowly. Before he could press further, the doors swung open with a rush of cool night air, and a hush swept over the pub at the entrance of two armed, uniformed men. _Sigurimi_. The Albanian secret police.

Tom fingered the wand concealed in his coat as they approached. The rest of the pub's patrons averted their eyes, flinching away in fear. By now, every third Albanian had been interrogated by the Sigurimi, or served time in one of their labor camps: the new post-war Communist regime was ruthlessly efficient at rooting out rebellion and dissent. It was admirable, really—having been in the country just three days, Tom already found himself taking notes.

The officers had locked in on him immediately upon entering: no doubt the Sigurimi's intelligence network had informed them of a visitor to the village. Considering he had been there less than half an hour, he was rather impressed. They moved at once to his table, ignoring the terrified barmaid shrinking back in her seat, and stepped somewhat closer than necessary—gloved hands resting on their guns. The fact that these Muggle men thought they could intimidate _him_ —he who had lied to _Albus Dumbledore's_ face and gotten away with it more times than he could count—was much less impressive. Tom wanted to laugh.

"You," the taller of the two was saying in a voice like gravel, "are not a citizen of this municipality."

It was not a question. "No," Tom said flatly, all the same.

"What is your business in Lundër?"

Tom gave a knife-edged smile. "Getting in touch with my roots."

The Sigurimi officer narrowed his eyes. "You are Albanian?"

Tom's smile sharpened. "Not exactly."

The officers exchanged a significant look. "Papers," the other barked, holding out a gloved hand. _"Now."_

Tom reached for the coat pocket not concealing his wand and retrieved his travel documents, handing them over with raised brows. They were entirely authentic, not even charmed: Antonin Dolohov had taken the assignment of procuring them _very_ seriously, and his family's connections in Moscow's magical underworld were unparalleled.

The Sigurimi examined them with sharp scrutiny as Tom tapped his fingers on the table, impatient to be done with it. "Tomas Ledrov..."

Tom traced the rim of his _raki_ , imagining shattering the glass and sending shards into their throats as he said, "I go by Tom." If he could not travel as _Voldemort_ , then _Tom Ledrov_ would do.

The first officer turned to the other and hissed, " _Sovjetik._ " Soviet. "Apologies, comrade," he said to Tom in Russian, handing back the papers with a conciliatory shrug. "There have been unauthorized British travelers, inciting uprisings in the north. We thought perhaps—"

"No harm done," interrupted Tom, also in Russian. "I am not here to start a revolution." He would be returning to England for _that._

The officers laughed as if he had made a marvelous joke. "That is fortunate for us," the taller one said lightly, clapping Tom on the shoulder in a way that made him want to murder. "You Bolsheviks could teach us a thing or two about those, eh?"

Tom opened his mouth to reply, then shut it tightly — he had noticed a man, staring at him from the shadows across the still and silent pub.

Gaunt and pale, with high, hollowed cheekbones and a shock of wild dark hair, his bloodshot eyes alone took in the scene—rather than pointedly averting his gaze or cringing back in fear like the rest of the pub's patrons, he was observing impassively, refusing to look away when Tom leveled him with a cool, penetrating stare. A quick attempt at Legilimency revealed this brazen stranger's mind to be closed off, unreadable: not protected by the mental walls of Occlumency, but curiously blank and... dead.

" _Udači_ , Comrade Ledrov," the first officer was saying. Tom wrenched his gaze away from the stranger with effort and nodded curtly. When he looked back as they turned to go, the dark-haired man had stood, was heading toward the door to slip outside unnoticed behind the Sigurimi.

Tom shut his eyes tightly, then opened them again, cursing the _raki_ , sure it had affected him more strongly than he'd thought—but no. He'd seen correctly.

The stranger had no shadow.

As soon as the doors had closed, the pub could breathe again. Sound returned in a rush of clinking glasses and nervous laughter, and the barmaid said breathlessly, "Tom." She leaned in, placing her hand, this time, over his. "A good name. It suits you."

Tom forced out another mechanical smile, wishing he could hurt her. "It was my father's name. He was a cruel, wicked man." Her face fell, and she seemed about to apologize—Tom removed his hand from hers and picked up the glass of _raki_. "My mother, though..." He took a sip and quirked a brow. "She was Albanian. Like you."

She giggled, revoltingly. "No wonder your Albanian is so good."

Tom gave a thin-lipped smile. His Albanian was _so good_ due to months of focused study behind the counter of Borgin and Burkes. That his knack for languages appeared as effortless as any of his other acquired skills—Dolohov had been quite startled to find Tom one day addressing him in perfect Russian, with no preamble whatsoever—was a credit to one of his foremost personal philosophies: all actions and accomplishments must seem natural and executed with ease. All toil and practice and clever tricks must be concealed; kept private. When Tom did choose to act in public, it was always with the appearance of effortlessness, as if he could do much more... and he _could_ , of course.

Another patron was waving her over impatiently—with a quick, flushed apology, the barmaid hurried to refill the drinks of a nearby table. Tom took advantage of her momentary absence to down the rest of the _raki_ with a shudder. _Waste not._

The Muggle girl hurried back over moments later, looking rueful. "I am sorry—I have to get back to work—"

Tom reached up to seize her by the jaw, ignoring her sharp intake of breath. He sent an image of the stranger without a shadow into her mind, compelling her to answer without questioning why. "Who is this man?"

She paled, trembling in his grip. "I do not know his name. We... We do not speak of him."

Tom tightened his grip as tears sprung to her eyes, feeling pleasantly warm from the alcohol and pleasantly stimulated from the exertion of pain—then gathered himself and released her, casting a Memory Charm under his breath to erase his fleeting harshness. Her features settled back into sweet docility as he snapped, "Why?"

"They say he is a _djall_." Tom furrowed his brow, trying to place the unfamiliar Albanian word—the closest he could translate it to English was _devil_. The barmaid blushed, seeming to take his puzzlement as judgment of her quaint peasant superstitions. "It's foolish, I know, but they say he is... not human."

 _Interesting_.But more pressingly—"Sing me the folk song," he implored with a slow, suggestive smile, letting his gaze linger on her curves as he looked back up at her. "About the hollow tree."

She shook her head, blushing even redder in the dim light. "Singing is not among my talents."

Tom stood, encircling a hand around her waist as he brushed aside her hair and breathed into her ear, "I'll be the judge of your _talents_." He led her out the nearby back door while she was still too startled by his sudden interest to protest. "Sing," he commanded, leaning her up against the wall, and she drew a shaky breath, shivering in the cool night air.

"The wicked witch in the wood," she sang softly, in a light, lilting voice—not half-bad, really, though Tom's impatient expression did not change—"hides a stone beneath her hood." Now, Tom didn't bother to hide his fervent spark of interest. Seeing it, she sang with more surety, gaining confidence. "It will make you wise to look in her eyes, the wicked witch in the wood." Tom hardly dared breathe as she finished: "She'll curse you, too, from her hollow yew, the wicked witch in the wood."

 _Hollow yew._ Tom's hand twitched toward the yew wand concealed in his coat, fingertips buzzing, Dark magic stirring to life underneath his skin. That moonlit forest on the outskirts of the village—a yew tree, a hollow yew tree—it was perfect, _too_ perfect—

"My mother..." Tom jolted, reminded in an infuriating rush of the peasant girl's continued presence, still expectant of his time and attentions even after ceasing to be useful. "...sang it to me as a child," she was saying shyly, smiling up at him. "What do you think?"

"I think," said Tom, pulling her closer and entwining one hand in her hair, "that you..." He twisted sharply, pulling her head back as she gasped—preparing to snap her neck _. "..._ are a _terrible_ singer."

A sudden, obliterating explosion of pain.

Tom staggered to his knees, throwing the barmaid backward—her head hit the wall, sending her collapsing to the ground unconscious as Tom clutched at his chest. His _heart._

A sharp, wooden— _stake_ —was in his heart.

He wrenched it out immediately and seized his wand, casting a cauterizing charm to stop the bleeding and climbing quickly, if unsteadily, to his feet. The Killing Curse was on the tip of his tongue as he whirled around, but died in his throat upon seeing his attacker. Stunned, stricken, and... strange.

The man without a shadow.

"What are you?" The stranger's voice was soft, and shook, a little. He spoke Albanian smoothly and fluently, without Tom's careful foreign enunciations, but with a strange, somehow archaic accent.

"I could ask the same of you," Tom managed, grasping through his shirt at the chest wound that by all rights should have killed him. It was closed now, no longer bleeding. Shock and fleeting pain aside, he felt no different: his Horcruxes had done their duty, and the locket—thank Salazar—was unharmed.

He had tested various means of lethal injury on himself before, of course, but never _stabbing._ How incredibly crass. How... Muggle.

This man, though... _this_ man did not seem to be a Muggle at all. He was bending down, picking up the bloodied wooden stake, looking back in understanding at Tom's still-outstretched wooden wand. "You are a warlock."

Tom brushed off his clothes, breathing rather less hard now. His heart had nearly stopped racing, but adrenaline was pumping madly through his blood alongside rushing currents of Dark magic, jolting like electricity against his nerves. Brushes with Death were always a shock to the system. "We prefer the term _wizard_ these days."

The stranger's gaze was as sharp as his weapon. "Whatever the word, a stake to the heart should kill your kind as well as any vampire."

"Vampire?" Tom stared, taken entirely aback. "You—for Salazar's sake, you thought I was a _vampire?"_ Filthy, night-bound creatures that required regular infusions of Muggle blood to reach some lesser approximation of immortality—how revoltingly insulting.

"You were going to kill the girl."

Tom smiled tightly. "Yes."

"Why?"

Why indeed? Tom looked down at the Muggle peasant, still unconscious in the dirt. Weak. Foolish. Pitiful. The Gaunt girl's face appeared unbidden in his mind, and when he spoke, his voice was hard and cold, like metal. Like the locket weighing heavy on his whole, uninjured chest. "She was unworthy of life."

"And are you a god," the stranger without a shadow said scornfully, "to decide who lives, who dies?"

Tom trailed his gaze down to the bloody _stake_ with a pointed glare. "Are you?"

"Not a god, no." He gave a short, bitter laugh. "Perhaps a devil."

Tom raised a brow. "A _djall._ " The stranger's mouth opened in surprise. He seemed about to speak, but Tom spoke faster: _"Avada Kedavra!"_

A brilliant, blinding flash of green—Tom's very favorite color—lit up the darkness.

When it cleared, the man without a shadow was still standing, shaking his head with a small, sad smile. "You are not the only one immune to Death."

"So it would seem," said Tom, lowering his wand and stepping closer. "That's not quite right, though is it?" The stranger's eyes glinted in the moonlight, but he did not speak, and did not step away. "Not quite immune, not quite immortal..." Tom tilted his head, taking in the stranger's bloodshot, yellowed eyes; his pale, waxen skin and hollowed, somehow ageless features. "Death has already taken you."

" _Djall_ is not quite right, either," the deathless stranger said softly. "I am no ordinary devil. And you are no Albanian—" Tom smiled coldly. "—but perhaps you know the word _lugat?_ A creature of darkness, a corpse who creates more corpses..."

"A vampire," finished Tom. He was unable to restrain a short laugh—the audacity. The _absurdity._ "You thought—you truly believed—that _I_ could be one such as you?"

"A killer pale as Death with blood in his eyes and darkness in his very pores, toying with his prey in the shadows?" Tom blinked, and the vampire snorted. "I cannot imagine why I would think such a thing."

"I have a shadow," snapped Tom. He fingered his wand, considering possible curses. He had never met a vampire—who could say what uses he could find for one? A Dark creature that could not die, except by a stake to the heart...

"True vampires have shadows," the creature was saying with quiet patience. "I myself am only half vampire."

Tom looked up sharply. "A half-breed?" Who hunted _true_ vampires, apparently. How charming.

"Of sorts. Now that we have each attempted to kill each other, perhaps introductions are in order. You are Tom Ledrov, or so you would have the Sigurimi believe. I am Trocar Dhampiraj." He extended an elegant, long-fingered hand.

Tom took it. Trocar Dhampiraj was cold as a corpse.

"A newly-turned _lugat_ ," he said now, releasing Tom's hand with a puzzled, searching expression, "may visit his widowed wife and can have children with her. A _dhampir_ is the half-breed, as you say, that results. These undead children do not have a shadow, or a soul, but they have the ability to find, see and kill a _lugat_." Trocar's dead, dark eyes had gone distant, fixed on something Tom couldn't see. "True vampires can be destroyed by staking, but my kind cannot be destroyed at all. We are cursed to wander the world forever, never fully alive or dead. I have found my purpose in hunting and destroying as many of my fellow fiends as I can find. I began with my father, seven hundred and eighty-two years ago."

Tom studied him with new eyes, this ancient, bloody, soulless creature. "I, too, began with my father." A fellow fiend indeed. "You have remained in Albania, all those many years?"

"Borders," shrugged Trocar, "have always shifted with the centuries. I was born in a land called Arbanon, and I have roamed many lands since then."

 _The land of Arbanon_ , Helena had said, _now called Albania_.

"I am new to these lands," Tom said carefully, "and in need of a guide. Perhaps you can help me. Perhaps I could even help you."

Trocar smiled grimly. "Your quest, I suspect, has little to do with mine." He replaced the stake into a satchel at his side and turned to go, toward the dense, distant forest. "There is a _lugat_ near this village. There are signs. You are not the predator I seek." He looked back at Tom, then down at the Muggle peasant girl, stirring slowly back to consciousness. "I suggest you leave your prey as bait for a different devil."

The shadowless creature sank back into the shadows, disappearing down the dark path leading toward the forest within moments.

Tom watched him go, then turned to see the barmaid struggling up, moaning, clutching her head. She shrank back in fear upon seeing Tom, seeming about to cry out.

"Shh," he soothed, moving closer—reaching out into the wounded coils of her mind, rearranging her memories. "That _djall_ attacked you, didn't he?"

"Y-yes," she stammered out, eyes glazed over in Obliviated confusion. "He was—so fast—"

"You're safe now," purred Tom, tracing a finger down the throat he had so nearly snapped as her breath hitched in her throat. "I saved you."

"Thank you," breathed the girl. "Thank you, Tom."

"You'll repay me, won't you? When I call for you, you'll come." She nodded, breathless. "Good girl." He led her over to the door of the pub, smirking at her dishevelment—leaves in her hair, dirt on her clothes. "Go back inside now," he murmured in her ear, adding one final memory, "and tell them all we've had a _very_ good time."

She obeyed with a flushed, dazed smile.

On returning to his room in the village inn, Tom released the protective curses he had placed on every square inch of the premises and went at once to the small, warded suitcase containing his diary Horcrux.

The ring was buried (and good riddance), the cup was hidden safely back in England, and Salazar's locket would remain only a locket until a worthy arrangement could be devised—the diary, however, was _useful._ He seized a quill.

 _The wicked witch in the wood_ , he wrote, _hides a stone beneath her hood. It will make you wise to look in her eyes, the wicked witch in the wood. She'll curse you, too, from her hollow yew, the wicked witch in the wood._

All other ink sank away into the parchment, leaving only one word illuminated on a blank white page: _yew._

The tree that lived longer than any other, growing for thousands upon thousands of years. The tree that had made his wand.

How many ancient yew trees filled that ancient forest?

 _Show me Helena,_ he wrote. _That day in the forest, sixth year._

At once, the pages began to flutter, and the shabby furniture around him began to tilt and blur. Tom leaned forward into a whirl of shadow and color, with a soft woman's voice breathing in his ear: "You shouldn't be here, Tom."

He opened his eyes to find himself in the Forbidden Forest.

It was always less foreboding during the day. Sunlight slanted through the trees, casting warm light on the forest's sharp stones and thorns. Harmless birds chirped in the distance: the darker creatures that roamed these woods at night were still and silent in the light of day, though that did not make the forest any less forbidden to the students of Hogwarts.

The translucent ghost of Helena Ravenclaw floated by a gnarled oak with ancient runes carved into its wood, speaking to someone more invisible than she was. Tom, settling into the memory, leaned against a nearby tree and watched as a Disillusionment Charm melted away, revealing his own sixteen-year-old self in Slytherin robes: slightly lither, with shorter hair; perhaps somewhat less pale. The Gaunt stone glinted on his right ring finger.

"Shouldn't be here?" he was repeating. "Did you say that to Perpetua Fancourt, when she invented the lunascope over a series of illicit nighttime visits to the Astronomy Tower? Or perhaps to Ignatia Wildsmith, when she created Floo powder while experimenting with plants stolen from the Herbology greenhouses?" The usually austere lines of Helena's mouth twisted in amusement, and Tom's younger self shrugged with an easy smile. "Both, as I recall, were quite _intrepid_ Ravenclaws."

"You, Tom Riddle, are no Ravenclaw." She studied him with a pensive, probing expression. "Which is all the more the pity for Ravenclaw House."

"The Baron does not deserve me?" Tom said in that same light and teasing tone—pretending not to notice as Helena's solemn features darkened.

"The Baron," she said with a knife-sharp edge to her voice, "deserves _nothing_."

"I can say with certainty, my Lady," Tom said quietly, "that he did not, at very least, deserve _you_."

If a ghost could have paled, Helena would have. "What has he told you?" she whispered, circling the oak.

Tom examined a rune carved into the tree with careful interest. "He does not often speak, but when he does, he speaks of a brilliant, beautiful woman—a woman far too good for him, a woman that he loved." He paused, seeming to hesitate a moment before continuing. "I have seen how he looks at you, and I—" He swallowed, casting his eyes downward in a convincing impression of sudden shyness. "I recognize that look."

Watching from a few feet away, a ghost himself within the memory, Tom nearly laughed.

Fortunately for Helena, ghosts could not blush, either. She shook her head as if to clear it, not meeting Tom's eyes. "And did he say," she asked in a hard, unsteady voice, "why he wears those chains? I presume he did not tell you why he is so _Bloody."_

"No, my Lady," said Tom, widening his eyes.

Helena gave a short, humorless laugh. "I thought not." She looked up at the trees, closing her eyes: for a moment, it seemed almost as though she was at peace. "I died in a forest," she said softly, "in the land of Arbanon, now called Albania." Tom stood very still, listening closely: she was speaking as if to herself, as if she had forgotten he was there. "It was much like this one, ancient and twisting, too dark and frightening for most to wander. I stayed there for years, in a grove near a stream... I built myself a cottage, then a life. Muggles came to me for help, for magic cures, for... wisdom." She opened her eyes, and Tom saw that they were filled with ghostly tears. "I was hiding, but it felt like freedom. I come here, sometimes, to remember."

"The Baron," Tom prompted, as if in dawning comprehension, "found you."

"Yes," said Helena, looking away. "He tracked me down, at my mother's urging. I took it, you see." When she met Tom's eyes again, her gaze was hard. "Her diadem." His memory self said nothing, but Tom, watching closely, could see his breath catch in his throat. "I was foolish, but so was my mother, to think I would ever return with him," Helena finished flatly. "The Baron killed me, then himself. For a thousand years he has stalked and haunted me." She let out a scornful scoff. "That is his idea of _love_. _"_

"Desiring wisdom and freedom," said Tom, stepping forward with calculated sympathy and understanding in his eyes, "is not foolish or a crime."

"The diadem did not belong to me," she said in misery, "any more than I belonged to the Baron."

"And now it belongs to no one. With her fear that you would overshadow her in wisdom, your mother ensured that the wisdom of the diadem was lost forever." Helena's mouth opened slightly as she stared at Tom. He shook his head sadly. "How tragic that she, wise as she was, could not see that."

"It is not lost," breathed Helena. "Only hidden."

Tom tilted his head, looking for all the world only passingly curious. "In the forest?"

She nodded slowly, reaching out as if she could touch the oak tree—tracing the rune that Tom had been examining, seeming once again lost in thought. "The people of the _sídhe_ —you would call them the Druids, now, I suppose—knew the language of trees."

She spread out her fingers, motioning for Tom to do the same—he did so, raising a brow. "Each section of each finger corresponds to a word or letter, which then corresponds to a particular tree that possesses certain properties. Oak, for instance, summons strength. Draw upon the power of the tree as you move your fingers—" Tom mimicked her as she twisted her hand into a fist and opened it again, feeling a buzzing in his fingertips. The rune began to glow. "—and you are spelling out your intent."

With a low rumble and a resounding _crack_ , the oak tree split open at the rune.

" _Spelling_ in the literal sense." Tom looked at its ancient wooden entrails, then down at his hand. The Horcrux ring felt searing hot around his finger. What could he do with other runes and symbols, other trees?

Helena nodded, wistful. "My mother taught me the old ways, when I was young."

"Will you teach me now," asked Tom, not bothering to hide the hunger in his voice, "and pass on her knowledge?"

Helena eyed him, almost smiling. "Perhaps."

From his place in the shadow of a different tree, Tom observed his younger self observing Helena as she demonstrated a dozen signs and signals, laughing the first real laugh he'd ever seen her laugh when an improperly drawn rune caught one of the branches on fire, sending Tom leaping out of the way as it fell, narrowly singing his robes.

"I expect this would be much less difficult," Tom said—again, that light, teasing tone, seizing on the fondness in her laughter—"if I were wearing a certain diadem."

Helena stared at him a moment, laughter dissolving into silence, then sighed. "Salazar had the same insatiable thirst for knowledge. A Ravenclaw is content to bask in cleverness. A Slytherin never feels he has enough to be content."

Tom couldn't argue with _that_.

Helena leaned in very close, almost touching his skin—he shivered, feeling a chill run over him. "A hollow tree in a forest in Albania," she breathed into his ear. "That, Tom Riddle, is the only riddle I will give you." She drifted through the ruptured tree, calling as she floated away into the woods, "If you find it, someday, clever boy..."

Tom sat up in a small, shabby room in an Albanian village inn, Helena's parting words written in stark black ink on the diary's parchment:

 _Bring it back._

* * *

The following day, he entered the forest at nightfall.

Seven years exploring the Forbidden Forest at his leisure—tracking down magical beasts for personal projects or potions; experimenting with new spells better suited to the outdoors than to the Chamber of Secrets; practicing curses on enemies or unsuspecting paramours—had made him fondly familiar with the terrain of a dark wood. Helena had been right: these knotted, twisted trees felt familiar in their unfamiliarity; every sinister shadow and ominous sound felt more like home. Whatever Dark creatures lurked here, they were not as Dark as Tom.

He went over the folk song as he slashed his wand through the thorny underbrush, making as much noise as possible.

 _The wicked witch in the wood hides a stone beneath her hood._

Helena Ravenclaw, playing the fairytale witch out of a cottage in these woods—

 _It will make you wise, to look in her eyes, the wicked witch in the wood._

—putting the ancient power of that diadem to use solving the mundane problems of Muggle villagers. Such _freedom_ , Tom thought in disdain.

 _She'll curse you, too, from her hollow yew, the wicked witch in the wood._

No medieval witch was a stranger to Dark magic: in the days of the Founders, most spells had yet to be categorized or formalized into standard domestic Latin. Rowena Ravenclaw, a descendent of Druids, would have taught her daughter all manner of raw, unfettered magic—tree languages, Tom knew, were only a taste of what Helena must know. Wherever she had hidden the diadem, it would be easier to find than to take.

The sound of crunching twigs behind him made him stop, and smile.

By the time the creature attacked from behind—baring sharp, bloody teeth—Tom had already silently Disapparated and re-Apparated behind it, restraining it with a lazy _Incarcarous._ The thwarted vampire thrashed wildly in its bonds, screaming and cursing in Albanian: Tom hit it with a Silencing Spell, and a _Stupefy_ for good measure.

"Trocar," he called to the trees, "come collect your... predator."

A beat—perhaps two—and the _dhampir_ stepped out from the shadows, bloodshot eyes gone wide.

Tom lifted his brows in amusement. "I would say I make better bait than the barmaid, wouldn't you?" Trocar snorted, not dignifying that with a reply. Kneeling quickly over the vampire _,_ he raised that accursed stake— _"Wait,"_ snapped Tom.

Trocar froze, watching warily as Tom knelt down beside him and Conjured an empty glass vial. A Slicing Spell to the throat filled it with blood in an instant: Tom pocketed the vial, and stood. "Very well," he said with a dismissive wave. "You may proceed."

Within moments, the vampire was dust.

Trocar stood as well when it was done, at eye level with Tom. "You knew I was following."

"Naturally," said Tom.

"You lured the _lugat_ to you, knowing it would attack."

 _"Naturally,"_ said Tom.

"And now that you have felled my prey, you think that I will be your guide." Tom smirked, and Trocar shook his head, starting toward the trees again—stopping abruptly when the branches flung themselves toward him and around him, trapping him in place.

"I am seeking a grove, near a stream," Tom said lightly, lowering the hand simmering with magic. "Perhaps you can show me the way."

Trocar met his eyes, resigned. "Perhaps I can," he said at last, in accented English.

Tom smiled.

* * *

As he allowed himself to be led deeper into the woods with his wand lighting the way, Tom began to see that there was more to this foreign forest than he had suspected in his initial survey. Worn, burnt-out candles—the remnants, he assumed, of forgotten pagan rituals—could be found in many of the whispering trees, and he could have sworn there were strange, floating lights visible just through the branches, always disappearing just as he noticed them.

Most eerily of all—although the vampire that had been following him was gone, and the half-vampire that had been following _it_ was at his side—and although repeated silent castings of _Homenum Revelio_ revealed no one else nearby—Tom could still not shake the feeling of being watched.

"There are places," Trocar said quietly, as if he could hear Tom's unsettled thoughts, "that are liminal, between the borders and boundaries of worlds. The place you are seeking is one of them: a circle deep within these woods where nothing grows, and strange apparitions can be seen." Helena's lost forest grove. "As we near it, you will feel it."

Tom tightened his grip on the yew wand. "Your English," he said dryly, "is quite good."

Trocar spared him a sidelong glance. "I have had, shall we say, many years of study."

"What gave me away?" asked Tom. The sound of their voices in the forest made it feel less threatening, somehow—reminded him that they were, after all, two immortals.

"Salazar," answered Trocar, seeming satisfied as Tom looked to him sharply. " _For Salazar's sake,_ you said. I have known none but English warlocks to swear by Salazar."

"How many English _warlocks_ have you known?" Seven hundred and eighty-two years ago was a hundred years too late to have known the Founders (or Helena and the Baron, for that matter; pity, that)—but how touching, for Salazar's name to have spread so widely within a century of his death.

"You," said Trocar, neatly side-stepping the question, "are the most interesting by far."

Before Tom could reply, Trocar raised a hand to stop him, pointing to a rusted concrete grate just visible beneath the leaves in front of them when Tom shone his _Lumos_ -lit wand on the ground: a bunker. "Not all mortals," he said in response to Tom's questioning look, "fear this forest. Some have very different fears."

No doubt.

"The Sigurimi seemed not to see you, in the pub," said Tom, remembering the way Trocar had slipped behind them like a shadow. "How do you do it, without magic?"

"I can avoid being seen by mortals, if I wish," was all he said, "and even I do not wish to be seen by them." Tom imagined, for a moment, what he could do with an army of Trocars: undead warriors that could not die, able to hide themselves at will. "If they discover you are English," his deathless guide was saying now, stepping around the bunker entrance and continuing through the woods, "they will try to kill you."

"Yes," Tom said archly, "they're very good at killing. Fortunately, so am I."

"They are better. I have lived eight hundred years, and never have I seen such a war as was just won. Such death… such horror… such desolation. Never did I think men capable…"

"More than men waged that war." Grindelwald had raised plenty of hell in wizarding Europe before Dumbledore had cut him down.

"Yes," Trocar nodded. "Your kind, too, killing in the shadows. Your kind kills cleaner, I will give you that. But mortals… they kill _better_."

Tom considered this with the memory of London air raid sirens ringing in his ears, echoing around a damp, cold basement—the closest thing Wool's Orphanage had to a bomb shelter. He had swallowed his pride and requested to be allowed to stay at Hogwarts over the summer in his fifth year, when the Blitz was at its worst—Dippet would have let him, but Dumbledore, predictably, had intervened. (In a way, he had finally made his first Horcrux that summer out of spite.) The summer before his final year at Hogwarts, British Army recruiters had arrived unannounced at the orphanage, leaving with half a dozen eager new conscripts. All were dead within the year. "Next year, lad," they'd said to Tom—a threat disguised as a promise.

Hitler, the man who had commanded the Blitz, the Muggle who had slaughtered millions of his fellow Muggles on a scale that Grindelwald could only _dream_ of, was rumored to be part Jew. Tom knew in his bones it was true, and suspected Trocar knew it, too: hatred fostered from a distance was nowhere near as powerful as hatred festered from within.

No Pureblood could hate Muggles as viscerally, as _intimately_ as the half-blood who lived among them at their darkest hour, who might have been collateral in their war if he had not been the only seventeen-year-old boy in the world with Horcruxes.

It had never come to that, of course: by the time Tom was old enough to be conscripted, Hitler had fallen along with Grindelwald. From what Tom had been able to tell, the Muggle weapon that had finally ended the war was in a new league of annihilation, beyond what anyone—magic or Muggle alike—could comprehend. Splitting the atom, just as Tom had split his soul—the Muggles' own Darkest Art.

What good were wands against a bomb that could level a city?

He would restrain them before it came to that—Muggles, with their unparalleled taste for terror, their unquenchable thirst for destruction. He would restrain them, and contain them… but he would learn from them, too.

"I suppose," he said aloud, "we are agreed on that point."

Neither of them spoke further, for they had arrived at a clearing in the forest.

One might even call it—as Godric did, in naming his little village by the woods—a _hollow_.

Enormous, looming trees, the largest and surely most ancient he'd seen yet, encircled a starlit expanse of leaves and overgrown greens where a witch's cottage had once stood. The faint bubbling of a brook—a stream, Helena had said—was audible nearby. There was, Tom noted instantly, an abundance of yews. Many of the trunks were burnt—more rituals—but how many of them were hollow?

Tom stepped into the center of the clearing and removed the vial of vampire blood from his pocket, feeling Trocar's piercing dead stare on him as he did.

"You must know, knowing blood as you do," Tom told him with a slight, mocking bow, "that blood is the carrier of magic." Uncorking the vial, he turned in a slow, steady circle, dripping the blood out drop by careful drop and watching as it sank into the forest floor.

"Vampires have no magic," said Trocar, expression unreadable.

"Don't they?" Tom sheathed his wand and lowered himself to his knees, placing both palms flat on the cool, damp ground. "The force that animates a corpse to life again, that drives it to drain the life force of the living—is that not magic?" Tom closed his eyes. When he opened them again, a glowing crimson circle had surrounded him where the blood had seeped into the dirt.

Trocar stepped back, eyes wide, as red, smoldering streaks beneath the ground stretched out vein-like from the circle and crawled up each of the yew trees. One by one, they lit up from within, then dimmed again: no Dark magic lay inside them. Until finally, with a final searching crimson thread, one of the yews on the outskirts of the clearing lit up brighter than the others, then continued pulsating—as though it had a secret, beating heart.

Tom's own heart was pounding. He checked the time with a watch in his coat—a quarter of an hour to midnight, just as planned—then stood and stepped forward, breaking the fading circle, each step feeling heavy with the inevitability of fate.

"I was a child when I unlocked the mysteries of Death," he heard himself say, approaching the glowing red yew. Trocar was silent, watching intently as Tom raised the yew wand and carved an ancient sigil into the yew tree. "Death was slinking all around me, following me, hovering in the air beside me like a levitating shroud. I sensed that no matter how I prepared my body or protected my mind, Death would eventually come for me, would come for everything. I would not— _could_ not—accept that. Life was poisoned for me. The shroud was strangling me, wrapping itself tighter around me with every passing day." He shuddered involuntarily. Even now, the sensation of Death so close by for sixteen years—through the war, through his early experiments, through how many scrapes and illnesses and accidents and duels—was sharp and vivid in his memory. Even now, he knew, Death lingered just beyond his Horcrux shields, hating to be kept at bay.

"I couldn't understand," he continued after a steadying moment, now placing the wand over his wrist, "why those around me did not abandon everything else—all diversions, all distractions—and devote their every waking moment to defeating Death. And then I realized…" He lowered the wand with the same silent spell that had cut open the vampire's throat: the veins in his wrist burst open in the shape of the rune he had carved into the wood: an ancient symbol of death. "The only way to defeat Death," he finished, ignoring the pain, ignoring the _life_ rushing out in a mad, red gush from his body, "is to become a dealer of Death. To devour it before being devoured."

"Only the dead are true dealers of Death," Trocar said softly from behind him, fixated on the blood pouring from Tom's skin. "Life should produce more life."

Tom did not reply. Lifting his bleeding wrist to the tree, he pressed it against the matching death rune.

Dark magic was old magic, and blood magic was oldest. The most sacred sigils, the most powerful portals, the strongest seals, required a sacrifice—required blood.

Rowena Ravenclaw had known it. Her daughter had known it, too.

As his blood drained into the wood, Tom could feel the tree's bloody pulsations like the palpitating of his own heart. Dizzily—rapidly growing faint—he raised his other hand and performed the sign of the yew.

 _Yew summons death,_ Helena's ghost had told him in a brighter, now faraway forest, _but it summons life as well. If it can be said to stand for anything, it stands for resurrection._

The tree split open at the rune.

Inside, where she had used her last breaths of life to lock herself within the yew's dark, hollow depths for a millennium, the skeleton of Helena Ravenclaw grinned back at him—and on her rotting yellowed skull sat a glittering, untarnished sapphire diadem.

Before Tom could move or speak, he was dragged to the ground, with Trocar Dhampiraj sinking sharp teeth into his arm.

Tom tried and failed to throw him off, weakened by the blood loss, his vision dotted with sapphires. "You cannot kill me," he gasped out, the trees and stars above him seeming to spin in a dizzying whirl. Trocar was clearly past caring what he could or could not do to him—or, perhaps, past hearing. His bloodshot eyes were crazed and feral; his mouth locked onto Tom's wound as if sealed to it by magic. Tom wondered dimly, fading fast, if he would have enough blood left inside him to make the Horcrux.

 _"Tom!"_

He heard the Muggle girl's scream as if from very far away; vaguely saw the owl she had followed into the forest fly away as she raced into the clearing. _Meet me at midnight_ , he had written her earlier that day. _This owl will know where to find me._

Trocar had released him at last, startled out of his blood-crazed stupor by her frightened scream. "What have you done," he choked out to Tom, rolling away and retching blood onto the forest floor. Tom felt his strength starting to return now that he was no longer being forcibly exsanguinated—with concentrated effort, he pressed his fingers to the now-bloodless wound and murmured a cauterizing charm. The rune, he was certain, would scar.

"Tom," the barmaid was sobbing, "oh, _Tom._ "

He beckoned her closer, and she came—glancing fearfully at Trocar, still on the ground several feet away. "You saved me," he whispered, pulling her down toward him, "as I saved you." The peasant girl smiled through tears as he brushed aside her curls to cup her tear-stained cheek with his bloody left hand. "Would you like your reward?"

Without waiting for a reply, he kissed her. She moaned against him in pleased surprise as he parted her lips with his tongue—then screamed into his mouth when he bit down upon hers. He held fast as she struggled, sucking and swallowing her blood as Trocar had taken his own; hurrying along the Horcrux healing process, feeling stronger by the second. She tasted sweeter than his father, or the Warren girl, or even Hepzibah—killing her, he could already tell, would be a pleasure.

Feeling suitably restored, he shoved her aside and climbed to his feet, reaching at last for the diadem. It was larger than he had imagined, and heavier—weighted with millennia of wisdom. It would soon be weighed down with something even heavier than that: a piece of his soul.

Helena's bones had crumbled to dust as soon as he'd taken it. Ignoring the weeping girl for now, Tom turned to Trocar, feeling sudden inspiration. Perhaps it was the diadem, already sparking fresh genius within him.

"Your kind," he said, "cannot be destroyed, is that right?" Trocar glared up at him in revulsion, wiping blood away from his mouth. Tom raised his free, unbloodied right hand.

Wandless magic caught Trocar up into the air—Tom threw him into the recently vacated yew. Vines sprung up to trap him in place: one covered his mouth and muffled his screams, leaving his horrified bloodshot eyes visible as he struggled fruitlessly to free himself.

"Enjoy eternity, Trocar," Tom said softly.

The hollow yew tree sealed itself shut again, looking no different than it had looked when he had found it—but for a small, carved rune on its trunk.

In the fresh, fraught silence of the forest, Tom set down the diadem and unsheathed his wand, finally ready to create his fourth Horcrux.

 _"_ _Ju jeni djalli vërtetë,"_ his impending victim spat out in slurred Albanian, hardly able to speak with her wounded tongue. _You are the true devil._

"That," he agreed with a sharp, bloody smile, "is _exactly_ right."

* * *

 **NOTES**

If Tom returned to England in 1956 (the year Dumbledore was made Headmaster of Hogwarts) following an approximate decade spent abroad, it can be assumed that 1946—after a year spent working at Borgin and Burkes post-graduation and immediately after the murder of Hepzibah Smith—would have been the earliest time he could have stolen away to Albania to retrieve the diadem. The post-war Albanian government really did disallow British travelers in 1946, so Tom certainly picked an interesting time to visit...

The precise dates of the Hogwarts founders are ambiguous in canon, but if the Bloody Baron was in fact a baron, it can be inferred that he lived later than 1066, when William the Conqueror introduced the noble rank of _baron_ to England. At that time in the Middle Ages, what is now Albania was an autonomous principality within the Byzantine Empire known as Arbanon.

All aspects of vampirism discussed or mentioned here are grounded in real-life elements of Albanian folklore without contradicting anything we have been told about vampires in the Potterverse. "Trocar" was the name of a discarded character that J.K. Rowling originally intended to be a vampire teacher at Hogwarts, while "Dhampiraj" is a real Albanian surname originating from the word _dhampir_ —the folkloric half-breed that results from a human mating with a vampire.

 _Djall_ is the Albanian god of youth, later demonized by Christianity to refer to Satan and used as a synonym for any demon or devil.

Lundër is a real Albanian village whose name derives from the Old Norse _lundr_ , originally meaning a boat made from a hollow tree trunk.

The murder used to turn the diadem into a Horcrux was described by Rowling only as "an Albanian peasant".

The Gaelic Druids really did have a secret tree language known as Ogham, in which the names of various trees can be ascribed to individual letters and hand signals, used for cryptic ritual purposes.

Tom Ledrov is, of course, an anagram for Voldemort.


	2. The Queen of Death

I, too, have taken the god into my mouth,  
chewed it up and tried not to choke on the bones.

All people are driven to the point of eating their gods after a time:  
that craving for darkness, the lust to feel what it does to you  
when your teeth meet in divinity, in the flesh,  
when you swallow it down and you can see  
with its own cold eyes.

— from _Eating Snake_ by Margaret Atwood

 **New Orleans, Louisiana — 1950**

The hot, humid air of New Orleans was soaked with sweat and magic.

Tom cast another Cooling Charm under his breath and Conjured a handkerchief to wipe his brow, mentally cursing the graves of Salazar's _other_ descendants for absconding to America in the first place. Less than one day in the swamplands of the American South had told him all he needed to know about the Muggles of the United States: they were loud, brash, vulgar, and absurdly convinced of their own invincibility and superiority.

But New Orleans Muggles were one thing, and New Orleans _magic_ was another entirely. Every hanging fern and cast-iron balcony was imbibed with mystery and magnetism; each key of jazz music from a player on the streets or strain of piano drifting out the open windows of a decaying French Quarter townhouse hummed and throbbed with a mesmerizing, spell-like intensity. The entire city positively _crackled_ with magical energy, alive and breathing with a dynamic fervor that made the insular, old-fashioned world of wizarding Britain feel hopelessly stagnant and staid.

He had long heard rumors—hushed, uneasy whispers—of a Darker sort of magic threaded through the fabric of this city. It had taken only a single stroll down its streets to see why.

The arrival of old magic in the New World had created something different. Something original. Something riveting and strange.

Strangest of all, perhaps, was the utter lack of divide between Muggle and magic. Here, magic did not just simmer beneath the surface, hidden to Muggle eyes. It blended and blurred out in the open, visible in advertisements for divination readings, or shops that openly sold charms and potion ingredients. Ghosts passed unseen through crowds without provoking even a shiver—the Muggles of New Orleans, it seemed, were accustomed to the sensation of the supernatural.

Statute of Secrecy aside, the Magical Congress of the United States of America, Tom knew, was decidedly _tyrannical_ about segregation between the Muggle and wizarding worlds: they had gone so far (admirably enough, in Tom's opinion) as to ban any sort of fraternization with Muggles entirely.

How did the magical population of this particular American city get away with such brazen defiance?

Immersed in thought, Tom nearly missed arrival at his destination: a small, unassuming storefront on St. Ann Street, with paint peeling off its walls and Spanish moss growing on its shuttered windows. A worn wooden sign on the door read _Beauvais Sorcellerie_. Above the sign, a symbol he had never seen before was carved into the doorframe: two coiling snakes, surrounded by stars. Intrigued, Tom stepped forward and peered closer—just as the door creaked open.

The wary, weathered face of an elderly dark-skinned woman appeared through a crack in the doorway. "Stand back," she ordered in a reedy, rasping voice with an accent Tom had never heard before—French, but not entirely. Creole. "You cannot enter."

Tom raised a brow. "Violetta Beauvais, I presume." He plastered on his least threatening smile. "I would not wish to intrude—"

"Foreigner, outsider," she interrupted, spitting out the words. Tom's frozen smile faltered. "You have no talisman, no invitation, no business in my shop. Begone!"

"I seek only your renowned expertise," he started again, before the crone cut him off with a scoff.

"You seek nothing she has not granted you permission to seek."

Irritation and impatience twisted Tom's smile at last into a sneer. "And who, precisely, would _she_ be?"

"You know who," spat the witch who could only be the most notorious and elusive wandmaker in North America—elusive, Tom was beginning to see, for a reason.

"I can assure you," he said coldly, "I do not."

Violetta Beauvais eyed him for a moment—shrewd and calculating—before lowering her voice to a harsh whisper. _"La reine de la mort."_

The door slammed shut.

Tom stared at the cracked, crooked sign, then reached for his wand: if persuasion would not grant him the information he required, he would have to take it by force. Just as he was about to blast the door down, the sudden _crack_ of Apparition made him turn.

Two handsome brown-skinned men dressed in the casual Muggle style had appeared on the steps behind him, with matching tattoos on their muscular right arms: a version of the same snake sigil above Violetta's doorway. Tom narrowed his eyes and raised his wand, casting a silent shield around himself as he shifted into a dueling stance. They merely grinned back at him, unfazed, making no movement toward their own wands.

It happened too fast for him to speak or think a spell: in the next instant, the tattooed strangers had each lifted a hand curled into a fist, and were blowing a white powder directly into Tom's face.

Tom staggered backward, firing off a curse that likely missed, as his attackers were laughing—the last thing he heard, as everything around him dimmed and spun and faded, was a mocking phrase through the laughter: "Welcome to New Orleans."

The world went dark.

* * *

The first thing Tom noticed, when sight and sensation returned in a blur, was the absence of color. He was in a large, open room so white it was almost blinding: white brick walls, white wooden floors, white candles and white _skulls_ set on the shelves of the white French windows; more of that white powder shaped into runes on the ground.

The second thing he noticed was that he was restrained to a chair by ropes laced with powerful Dark spellwork, coiling around his limbs and—as he realized upon testing out a nonverbal spell—suppressing his magic.

Unfortunately for his apparent kidnappers, Tom's particular brand of magic was not the sort that could be contained by enchanted _ropes._

The two tattooed men were advancing toward him now that he had regained consciousness, striding quickly across the white room—Tom had the ropes Transfigured into two venomous black snakes in a blinking second, and was on his feet in a flash, hissing in Parseltongue, _"Attack."_

Their eyes went wide with shock, all traces of mockery or laughter wiped from their features at once as the snakes rushed toward them. They looked back as if for direction, and Tom saw for the first time that there was a motionless figure seated at the end of the white chamber.

A striking, statuesque woman with fierce dark eyes and high cheekbones, drawn in dangerous sharp edges. She wore a vividly colored handkerchief wound as a turban, set off by glinting hoop earrings, and sat on her enormous, high-backed chair as if it were a throne, resting her feet on a footstool covered in white cloth—resembling nothing so much as a monarch gazing down upon her subjects.

 _La reine de la mort,_ Violetta had said. The Queen of Death.

As soon as Tom met her eyes—so dark they seemed black, like pools of liquid obsidian—she raised an arm, and the white fabric at her feet fell away to reveal not a footstool, but a wooden crate... which opened to reveal an enormous python.

As it uncoiled itself and slithered out of the crate toward the black vipers, her full coral lips curved open in a hiss. _"An offering, Zombi."_

For one of very few times in his life, Tom actually felt his jaw drop.

The python was on the vipers in an instant, swallowing them whole. Tom stirred himself out of shock as the men—smirking once again—moved forward. His yew wand, he noticed now, was tucked into the back pocket of one of the taller one's trousers, and that, more than anything else, sparked cold rage within him. They _dared._

"Have a taste of your own medicine," snarled Tom, sweeping up the powder on the ground and sending it spiraling toward them in a forceful rush of wandless magic. They stumbled, coughing, as he forced it through their nostrils and into their lungs. Tom immediately Summoned back his stolen wand, and flicked it once: the men flew into the air, still sputtering. Tom tilted his head in concentration, and listened for the series of sickening _cracks_.

Moments later, he threw his would-be attackers back to the floor unmoving: limbs twisted at impossible angles; unseeing faces contorted in agony with the ghosts of their final screams still visible.

The Bone-Shattering Curse was one of his favorite acquisitions from a year spent in magical Moscow.

 _"Stand down,"_ he told the massive snake as it looked up at him with bright, canny eyes. _"I do not wish to harm your kind."_

 _"Nor I yours,"_ it said in a soft hiss, before turning back to its mistress and slithering up the throne to coil around her shoulders. She stroked it thoughtfully as Tom lowered his wand and stepped forward. He was simmering with restrained Dark magic, ready to release it all in an explosive surge at the first hint of an attack—but the Parselmouth queen seemed entirely unconcerned by his handling of her henchmen.

"British," she said, distastefully. Her low, accented voice was silvery and sonorous, seeming to soak into the air and seep beneath Tom's skin. "Is this the magic they are teaching at Hogwarts these days?"

Tom allowed a cold smile. "I am primarily self-taught."

"And yet," she said, arching a brow, "you seek _expertise_ from Madame Beauvais."

Tom didn't bother wondering at her precise knowledge of his conversation with Violetta: clearly the women were allies, and _this_ conversation had become far more critical. "Her reputation is world-renowned," he said carefully, "and I could not pass through this city without seeking her acquaintance. I did not realize that required prior acquaintance with _you."_

She raised her chin, haughty and proud—every inch a queen. "No practitioner of magic passes through my city without my knowledge."

"I meant no offense," Tom said smoothly, ignoring the fact that he had very much meant offense minutes prior. "I meant only to explore—"

"No practitioner of magic _explores_ my city without my permission."

Tom smiled tightly. "Then I humbly request permission to explore."

"You are not humble at all, I think." Her liquid eyes glittered with amusement. "What is your name?"

"Thomas Gaunt," he said at once, watching carefully for a reaction to the surname.

Unsurprisingly, the woman was an Occlumens, but her face was as unreadable as her mind: that aloof, amused expression did not change.

" _Anchante,"_ was all she said. "I am Madame Valura." The python was coiling down her shoulders to the floor—circling Tom, now, as she watched with a small smile. "And this, Monsieur Gaunt, is Zombi."

 _"Charmed,"_ Tom said in Parseltongue, bending to graze light fingers across the snake's smooth, spotted skin as it brushed against his leg.

"He likes you," Madame Valura said softly. "That is rare." Her sudden shift to Parseltongue was so jarring that a shock shivered through him all over again: _"So is your gift. I have only known one other, to speak in the serpent tongue."_

 _"I have known none,"_ said Tom. None aside from Morfin Gaunt, of course. His mind was whirring fast; spinning with new calculations. Parselmouths were contained to the Slytherin line— _known_ Parselmouths, in any case. Who was this woman, truly? Who was the _other_ , for that matter? Was there even the remotest possibility...

"The spirits," his fellow Parselmouth was saying, "are stingy with their gifts." She beckoned for Zombi to return to the crate at her feet, and the snake obeyed at once. _"Rest,"_ she murmured, casually waving a hand to refasten the crate and replace the white fabric. _"You will need your strength."_ Her wandless magic, Tom noted, was as precise and skillful as his own—perhaps even more so, though he'd be hard-pressed to admit it. Where, he thought with fleeting unease, even _was_ her wand?

"You have chosen an opportune time to visit New Orleans, Monsieur Gaunt," she said now, refocusing the piercing intensity of her gaze on Tom. "Tomorrow is St. John's Eve. Do you know it?"

"I do," said Tom. "It is better known, in my world, as the summer solstice."

The days of the Muggle saints had been ingrained in him in the orphanage, along with a litany of prayers and an abundance of Bible verses—some of which had found new uses. His little circle of Purebloods had listened to his recitations of unfamiliar phrases with the requisite awe and fear: _They will know that I am the Lord, when I lay my vengeance upon them._

Madame Valura was nodding. "There is a yearly celebration, out on Lake Pontchartrain," she said with a sly twist of her mouth. "Return here tomorrow night, to Maison Blanche, and you will have a proper welcome to my city."

He had killed her henchmen with Dark magic, and she was inviting him to a _party._

Which meant, of course, that there must be a catch—or a trap.

"I'd be delighted," was all he said aloud.

She spared him a slight smile and snapped her fingers. The French doors behind her swung open, and a third dark-skinned man—with that same serpent symbol tattooed on his arm—rushed in. Not even glancing at Tom—let alone his fallen fellows—he knelt down so that Valura could whisper in his ear, then hurried out again with a reverent nod.

Clearly the Queen of Death had henchmen to spare.

"You may tell Madame Beauvais," she said, turning back to Tom and raising one glittering hand, "that permission has been granted." Something coiled itself around his throat and settled on his chest, over the locket he still wore beneath his clothes. Tom's fingers clenched around his wand—but as soon as he reached up to wrench away whatever she had Conjured onto him, he paused, and allowed his magic to settle again at once.

It was a pendant: brass bound with twine and looped through a leather cord, with those same stars and serpents carved into its face.

Madame Valura was speaking in her low, lush voice. "I consecrate this talisman with the power to serve as protection for the one who wears it, for I am a servant of the spirits." The pupils of her eyes, Tom saw with a jolt, had narrowed into slits; snakelike glints of flashing moonshine swimming in the opaque black liquid of her gaze as she intoned: "So be it."

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, her pupils were round once more. It had happened so quickly that Tom could not be _entirely_ sure he hadn't imagined it. The consecrated pendant felt blistering hot against his heart.

"No door is closed to you," said Madame Valura, "while you wear my talisman. And when you return to Madame Beauvais…" The doors were opening; the servant hurrying in again—pressing a small bag of grey cloth into her hands with another deferential nod. "...you will return with a gift."

"As the Queen of Death commands," Tom said coolly, reaching to take the charm-laced bag from her outstretched hand. As their fingers brushed, a sharp jolt ran up his arm and through his nerves: _power,_ scorching across his skin.

If she felt it, too, she did not show it. "Tomorrow night, Monsieur Gaunt," she said softly, black eyes boring into his own.

Without breaking her gaze, Tom inclined his head in a sardonic bow, and said, "So be it."

* * *

Under the protection of Madame Valura, Tom found the city opened to him.

As soon as he stepped out of Maison Blanche, his unlikely benefactor's talisman was like a beacon, calling out to every witch and wizard that he passed. Some waved him over ("A little Cajun magic just for you, my friend! Compliments to _la reine!");_ others cringed away in fear, melting quickly into the shadows as soon as he looked at them (this, Tom could get used to). Many simply stared, fixated on the pendant around his neck in exactly the way he expected every Slytherin at Hogwarts would have been transfixed with the locket beneath his shirt, if he'd ever been able to wear it to class.

By the time he arrived back at _Beauvais Sorcellerie—_ only seven blocks from Madame Valura's enormous white cottage—he was in possession of half a dozen charmed business cards and several invitations to magical nightclubs or upcoming _fêtes_. As no _fête_ was likely to be livelier than the one he now planned to attend the following evening, and his only business in the city was here at this decrepit storefront, he Vanished them all immediately, and knocked once more on Violetta's door.

"I believe I have an invitation," he said sleekly, flashing the talisman as soon as she opened it.

Violetta Beauvais stared at him a long, penetrating moment, then sighed in resignation. "Come inside."

Crossing the threshold into Violetta's shopwas like entering a Darker, stranger Room of Hidden Things. Cluttered shelves overflowing with all manner of objects—jars of unfamiliar roots and herbs, burning incense and oils, colorful candles with strange carvings, vials and bottles labeled as everything from Bat's Blood to Devil's Dung—lined the walls, with alligator tails and eerie cloth figures nailed into the wood above them, along with the stuffed head of a snarling dog-like creature that Tom could only assume was the Louisiana _ragarou_ whose hairs Violetta had so infamously threaded into wand cores. Swamp mayhaw wood wands of various shapes and sizes were scattered haphazardly around the room, unboxed and unlabeled _._ Ollivander would be utterly appalled.

"Where is the _gris-gris?"_

Tom turned to see Violetta watching him with narrowed eyes. _"Gris-gris..."_ he repeated, turning the phrase over on his tongue— _grey-grey,_ it meant in French. His fingers went at once to the small cloth bag in his pocket. "I'm unfamiliar with the term."

Violetta scoffed, disdainful. "Of course you are. _Your_ magic is red, not grey."

Tom's brow furrowed. "Red magic?"

"Magic," Violetta said through clenched teeth, "is a grey area. Whatever they say about my wands, there is no difference between black and white, light and Dark. All that matters is intent." Her gaze found Tom's, and hardened. "A practitioner with eyes as red as yours wears his intent on his face. You have summoned evil, and taken it inside you. That, outsider, is red magic."

Tom resisted the urge to Conjure a mirror. Turning the diadem into a Horcrux had taken a physical toll, of course—and each toll grew steeper, it was true. He had left Albania with gaunter limbs and cheekbones, paler skin, and bloodier eyes... but no one in his subsequent travels across Eastern Europe and Russia had taken any particular notice of his appearance. The lands beyond the Iron Curtain were full of gaunt, pale, bloodied men.

The American South, clearly, was a different matter.

"Now," Violetta was saying in a low, cold voice, "hand me the _gris-gris_ she gave you, and tell me what you came for. I want you out of my shop."

Tom felt a muscle twitch in his jaw, but withdrew the charmed grey bag from his pocket and set it on a nearby table with a sharp smile. "As I come bearing gifts, perhaps you can send me off with knowledge in return. What is _gris-gris?"_

Violetta fixed him with a look of supreme scorn as she scooped up the bag. " _Vodou_ magic, beyond your skill or understanding."

This infuriating wandmaker, Tom reflected dispassionately—swallowing the curse in his throat—could count herself lucky he by now had two full decades of experience in cultivating exemplary self-control. "There is little," he said evenly, "beyond my skill or understanding."

Violetta—who was now peering inside the charmed bag of _gris-gris_ with a grim expression—merely snorted. "You know nothing of _vodou,_ and do not want a wand. What are you really here for?"

"On the contrary," said Tom, "I _do_ want a wand. It is, however, not one of your making." He could feel Violetta's eyes on him again as he dragged his eyes along the shelves, over those _ragarou_ wands. _Beauvais wands,_ an alchemist in Prague had told him, _take to Dark magic like vampires to blood._ Tom's own yew wand, however, was perfectly suited to his magic, and had handled vampires and blood with equal aptitude.

No, the wand Tom sought was not meant to channel Dark magic.

It was meant to hold a piece of his soul.

"I am told," he continued, "that you're something of a specialist in antiques. One might even call you a collector."

His former employer had described Violetta Beauvais in far less flattering terms: _thieving Creole bitch_ and _Negro vulture_ were among the less vulgar highlights. She had cheated Caractacus Burke out of a priceless Dark artifact in an estate sale decades prior, and the old man had never forgotten it.

"My private collection is not for sale," Violetta said icily. "Whatever you seek, seek it elsewhere."

This was hardly the first time Tom had been turned away by a potential seller—but he was no longer a shopkeeper at Borgin and Burkes, and his tactics of persuasion had been _greatly_ expanded in the past five years.

In a flash, he had her pressed up against the wooden door with his hand on her throat, freezing her in place with magic as he plunged into her mind with clinical precision. "Perhaps you should be more cooperative," Tom said lightly, "with a practitioner of _red magic_." He reached into his shirt for Salazar's locket, holding it up with the hand not wrapped around Violetta's neck. "Salazar Slytherin's wand was last seen in America." Genealogical records of the House of Gaunt had Gormlaith Gaunt dying in America—and Gormlaith Gaunt had been the last known inheritor of Salazar's wand. "Do you have it?" If anyone in America _would..._

"No," spat Violetta, eyes clouded over in his thrall.

Tom's mouth twisted in disappointment, hand clenching around her throat. "What do you know of it?"

"Made of—snakewood," Violetta choked out. She was fighting his compulsion with Occlumency, forcing him to repeatedly knock down her mental walls: he caught a glimpse of a castle in the mountains—Ilvermorny—and an enormous spotted tree. Then, a name, before Violetta's walls went up again: _Martha Steward._

Steward. Isolt Sayre had married a man named Steward, the records said, and had two daughters. One had never married, never had children. The other...

The other, Tom remembered now, had been a Squib, had married a Muggle—a Native man. There were no records of her, after that.

"Who," Tom said slowly, "is your Queen of Death descended from?"

"Mar—" Violetta started, then cut off, eyes wide. Tom again increased his pressure on her throat, and she swallowed hard, glaring at him so ferociously he nearly wondered if she could cast some kind of _vodou_ curse on him then and there. " _La reine de la mort,"_ she spat out at last, "has many _ancêtres_."

Tom's mind was racing, distracted momentarily from his hold on Violetta. She took advantage of his preoccupation to wrench him out of her mind and send him staggering backward with a wandless Revulsion Jinx. He restrained her again at once, sending a Dark hex shivering through her until she cried out in pain.

"I'm afraid I have a few more questions," he hissed. "What is _vodou?"_

"Old magic—" Violetta answered at once, to Tom's immense satisfaction—"from Africa."

Not just old magic, then, Tom thought with a flare of fervent interest: the very oldest. "Who practices _vodou?"_ he demanded. Women like Violetta and Valura, apparently, both of at least partial African descent—and both obviously Dark witches, however grey they liked to think of their magic. But a Dark _wizard_ like himself, from a very different land...

If Violetta could have rolled her eyes, Tom felt certain she would have. "Those who serve the spirits."

Vague, and summarily useless. A spirit could be anything from a Boggart to a Banshee to a Poltergeist, and somehow Tom suspected Madame Valura would not call herself a servant of any magical house pests. Setting the inscrutable depths of _vodou_ aside for now, he shifted gears. "The snake symbol on your door, and on this talisman—what it is it?"

"A _veve_ ," Violetta said faintly. "A symbol of the spirits."

Of course. How very helpful. Tom tightened his grip. "Which spirit?"

"Hers... "breathed Violetta in hushed tones—caught again between reverence and fear as Madame Valura's fierce face appeared in her mind. "Hers is the _veve_ of the serpent spirit... Li Grand Zombi."

 _Ah._ Now they were getting somewhere. "Why do you call her the Queen of Death?"

A shadow passed through Violetta's clouded eyes: she was struggling to throw him off again, and half-succeeding—Tom was exerting an extraordinary amount of magical effort to keep this frail old woman under mental and physical control. If her outright contempt of him hadn't been so supremely irritating, he would have been impressed enough to recruit her.

"Ask the dead," she bit out, clenching her jaw. A sharp sting of pain ran through Tom's arm, and Violetta gave a wide, vicious smile. His command over her was waning fast along with his rapidly-draining energy: the crone was _strong._ If he was going to be able to perform the necessary Memory Charms and leave without a duel, he was going to need to conclude this little interrogation.

Minutes later, Tom exited _Beauvais Sorcellerie_ with the locket and talisman both concealed beneath his shirt. He left Violetta sitting dazed at her table, staring at the grey bag of charms she called _gris-gris_.

There was a witch in America who could lead him to Salazar's wand, but it was not Violetta Beauvais.

Tom had a solstice celebration to prepare for.

* * *

The following evening at nightfall, the enormous white mansion he now knew as Maison Blanche lit up the colorful nighttime streets of New Orleans like a radiant bonfire, radiating music and laughter that could be heard from blocks away.

 _"Bonne fête,"_ grinned the men at the doors, nodding at Tom's talisman and waving him through into the entrance hall at once.

Having taken a single step inside, he stopped, and simply stared.

This was no tame Slug Club party or stuffy Pureblood ball: the sudden onslaught of contrasting sights, sounds, and smells was dizzying. Lavishly dressed musicians lined the walls, filling the hall with lively saxophone music, and guests that weren't throwing back magically-refilling drinks or eating the plates of crawfish and oysters being floated around the room were dancing: paired off in couples that were striking in their contrasts. Well-dressed white men and black men alike embraced shimmying girls and boys in varying shades of brown and varying states of undress, some of them obviously performing magic; all of them mixing and mingling as if there were no magical law enforcing segregation—or Muggle laws doing the same, for that matter, as the city's omnipresent signs imposing racial separation had made very clear.

An unmoving painting—Muggle, then, not magic—of an imposing, turban-clad woman hung above the staircase, directly facing the entrance: watching the lawless proceedings below her with an inscrutable dark gaze.

"Care for some moonshine, mister?"

Tom turned. One of the brown-skinned dancing girls had approached him, holding out a small tray of drinks beneath her bare breasts. She smiled seductively as he looked at her, trailing a hand down his chest. "Something sweeter, maybe?"

He felt her, before he heard her: the whole atmosphere of the room shifted suddenly, simmering with the aura of power. "Not this one, _ma belle,"_ that silvery low voice said from behind, louder and more musical than the saxophone melodies. "This one is for me."

Madame Valura was adorned tonight in white: a loose, low-cut dress in a shimmering fabric, set off against a jeweled headdress and cutting a fine contrast against the silken smoothness of her light brown skin. More strange _veve_ symbols—dots and lines, curved into rune-like patterns Tom did not recognize—were painted on her cheeks and arms, which were covered in gold bracelets. She bent to kiss the dancing girl full on the mouth before dismissing her with a shooing motion—turning her intent unwavering gaze on Tom.

"How do you like my hospitality?" she asked with a quirk of her coral lips, following him with those glittering black eyes as she circled him. He could feel everyone nearby watching, leaning in to listen—Madame Valura waved a wandless hand, gold hoop bracelets jangling, and the air hummed and shivered, cloaking them in a spell he identified as being similar to the Muffliato Charm, but looser, somehow... wilder.

One question gnawing at him was growing more ravenous by the second: what exactly was the nature of this woman's magic?

"An improvement," Tom said tightly, "over being dragged in unconscious and tied to a chair."

Her laugh was as alluring as the rest of her: unrestrained, magnetic. "So stiff, Thomas," she said now, dragging a light finger across his collar—across the cord of her talisman and the chain of the locket beneath his shirt. "So controlled. What is it like, I wonder, to see you lose control?"

Tom gave a thin smile. "I never lose control, Madame."

She scoffed. "No need for such formality. Not here, not now. Call me Aimée."

Aimée Valura… How very French.

Tom leaned closer. "How many know the Queen of Death's first name?"

"More than know me by that title," she said, dark eyes dancing in amusement. "Did you find what you were seeking, from Madame Beauvais?"

"Madame Beauvais," said Tom, stepping around the question, "seems to know you well."

"We are old friends—very old." Tom lifted a brow. Violetta Beauvais was a creature of the past century, while Aimée Valura looked barely thirty. "We have much in common," she went on, "but we differ in our methods." Seeing Tom's questioning look, she smiled. "Violetta, you see, plays by the rules." She gestured to the wild party all around them. "Do I seem the type to care for rules?" There was a hard edge to her voice as she continued. "There are two Congresses in America, _mon cher,_ and both would say I am the product of my parents breaking _rules_. Since the days of slavery, the magic Congress sees the other subjugate us from the shadows and does nothing. The rules of those in power never help my kind."

"Your kind..." Tom eyed her, puzzled. She was a _witch,_ above all else—why should she care for the plight of dark-skinned American Muggles, when magical America had already elected a dark-skinned woman President? The wizarding world judged worth by _power,_ not the color of one's skin; of course the Muggle world could not be so enlightened. Why would she choose to stay, this powerful Dark witch, in a world where her inferiors saw her as lesser?

"Yes," said Aimée Valura. "My kind." Her hard gaze roved over the room, lingering a moment on the portrait by the staircase. "My father came from France, a noble family. He would be worthless, in your world, but here, there was power in his blood—power that came from wealth, from titles, from the color of his skin. _Mais ma mère_..." A shadow passed over her features. "My mother came from those who were stolen from Africa, and from those whose lands were stolen from them here. The power in my mother's blood was power of a very different kind." She fixed Tom with a piercing stare. "What would they call me, in your world?"

"Half-blood," Tom said quietly.

Madame Valura tilted her head back to laugh. " _Half._ I am split more ways than that, _mon cher._ I am a child of three continents, born in a city of three countries. The blood in my veins flows in more than two directions." Her eyes found the talisman at Tom's chest, then flickered down, taking in the sleek, magically-tailored black suit he was wearing with an appreciative smirk. "We in New Orleans," she finished, stepping close so that their chests were almost touching, "do not share your British obsession with muddy blood. Here, all blood is dirty… and all blood is powerful, too."

In the next instant, an exhilarating thrum of energy hummed through him: Aimée Valura's lips were on his.

She was kissing him for the same reason she had kissed the dancing girl, Tom knew: because she _could_. New Orleans was hers, and everyone in it. He could taste the raw, scorching _power_ on her tongue, could feel the magic in his own blood rising up to meet hers and entwining with what felt like the force of an explosion. When she released him, both of them breathing hard, there was a sharp, knowing glint in her liquid eyes.

 _"Some bloodlines,"_ he leaned to hiss into her ear, hearing her inhale sharply at the Parseltongue, _"are more powerful than others."_

Madame Valura stepped back with a keen, searching expression, and seemed about to speak, when a distant, distorted voice severed the breathless moment of suspension between them.

"Madame?"

Tom and Aimée both turned to see one of her henchmen—sleeve rolled up to expose that familiar tattoo—bowing apologetically. The anti-eavesdropping charm around them dissolved at once.

 _"Pardon,_ Madame, but preparations are completed."

 _"Bien,"_ the Queen of Death said coolly, all trace of emotion vanished and replaced by her unreadable queenly mask. "Go to the lake with the others. I will follow." Her tattooed servant bowed again and Disapparated.

Madame Valura looked back at Tom with a final fleeting smile. "St. John's Eve is just beginning, Thomas Gaunt." She turned in a whirl of white and gold and disappeared through the white French doors at the far side of the hall, crowds parting for her as she passed in a sudden hush.

When she was gone, the energy in the room turned charged: crackling with palpable excitement and anticipation. Whatever was meant to happen at the lake, her guests were eager and ready.

Tom made his way over to the staircase, ignoring the curious looks and whispers as he passed. Up close, the portrait of the woman in the turban was cracked and faded, at least a century old. She had the same regal bearing as Aimée Valura; the same commanding and magnetic presence visible even in brushstrokes. Her skin was light brown, too, but slightly darker—and her eyes were softer, less fierce.

"Do you know her?" Tom half-turned to see a young woman had walked up beside him: his own age, or slightly younger, fully dressed in the modern Muggle style and speaking in a Southern American accent, without a trace of French. Her hair was a wild mass of curls, and her brown skin shone with magic. "The lady in the painting," she clarified with a hard smile that did not reach her golden eyes. "Seems like you know our hostess _very_ well."

"I do not," Tom said coldly. "Who is she?"

"That," said the curly-haired American witch, "is the first _vodou_ queen of New Orleans: Marie Laveau." She reached up to trace the frame of the portrait, looking almost reverent. "This was _her_ house, you know. Her headquarters. She ran the city, in her day... Everybody came to her for charms and potions and _gris-gris..._ Everybody wanted her help with an affair or a trial or a sickness... gettin' rid of bad _juju_... Whatever it was, whoever you were, Marie Laveau had the magic answer. She made _vodou_ famous."

"And now," Tom said slowly, understanding, "Madame Valura follows in her footsteps." If the Muggles outside of New Orleans saw _vodou_ as a silly Southern superstition, historically practiced by the dark-skinned descendants of slaves, what did it matter if the Muggles inside New Orleans still believed in magic?

"She should remember there were queens before her," said the golden-eyed girl, "and there'll be queens after." She looked sidelong at Tom, sparing him a contemptuous smile. "She's had toys before you, too, and she'll have more like you after."

Tom answered her smile with a cold one of his own, and saw her give an almost imperceptible shiver. "There are none like me."

He turned—the saxophones had gone silent.

At least a dozen skulls carved with runes like those painted on Aimée Valura's skin were now lined up along the walls. The guests moved to them at once, reaching out their hands together under the watchful eyes of Valura's grinning henchmen. The first group disappeared after grasping at a skull: they were enchanted, clearly, as Portkeys.

Tom readied himself and stepped quickly toward the nearest skull. As soon as his fingers touched bone, a lurching force hooked tight around his waist, transporting him away from the bright white light of Maison Blanche and into fiery darkness.

Humid nighttime air—drenched, he could feel at once, with Dark magic—soaked into his lungs along with heat and ashes: the midsummer bayou of Lake Pontchartrain was alight with a blazing bonfire.

St. John's Eve, it seemed, had finally truly begun.

Snare drums pounded out discordant music as more and more guests appeared within the firelit gloom of the swamp; silhouetted shapes against the hanging cypress trees looming over murky waters. Tom cloaked himself in shadow and stepped back to take in the scene. Behind the fire, he saw now, Aimée Valura sat on her high-backed throne—eyes closed against the flames casting flickering shapes across the sharp, painted planes of her face. A large wooden altar with a boiling cauldron was laid out before her, and upon some unidentifiable mass writhed the python she called Zombi.

The drumbeat quickened, building to a deafening crescendo—and then it stopped.

Valura's voice was low, but rang with power. Stillness rippled through the crowd and over the lake as she opened her eyes and said quietly: "The spirits demand a sacrifice."

The drums now beat a slower, darker rhythm. The dancing girls were spinning fast, gyrating around the fire, and those fierce dark-skinned men tattooed with the serpent _veve_ were chanting in a language Tom did not know—some African tongue, perhaps.

Then Madame Valura spoke again in her Creole French, and all his focus narrowed to the object raised above her head: a sharp blade glinting in the firelight, with a handle of familiar spotted wood.

A snakewood knife.

 _"L'appe vini, Li Grand Zombi, pour faire mourir,"_ intoned the Queen of Death. Li Grand Zombi comes to kill.

Two of her tattooed servants placed a live, screeching chicken on the altar, and the knife plunged downward.

Tom strained to see from the back of the crowd—she was reaching a bloodied arm inside the slaughtered animal, pulling out its entrails and placing them into the bubbling cauldron before holding up a small grey bag—recognizable at once as the same collection of charms she'd had him deliver to Violetta. _Gris-gris_. Had the crone returned it to her, filled with new ingredients? Madame Valura was pouring its contents into the cauldron—some sort of powder and dust. The python, having devoured the remains of the chicken, coiled up her shoulders, curling around her outreached arms.

It was then that Tom saw what the snake had been concealing on the altar: two broken human bodies.

The henchman he had killed with the Bone-Shattering Curse.

That snakewood knife now plunged into each of their hearts in turn. _"S'élever,"_ commanded the Queen of Death, dipping her fingers into the cauldron and spreading the bloody potion over their lips and eyes. Glowing heat illuminated the corpses from within; a patchwork of lines shining underneath their skin to match the _veves_ on her flesh.

When the light faded, the two dead men sat up in disjointed synchronization, climbed down from the altar with their twisted limbs, and bowed to Madame Valura.

Tom nearly forgot how to breathe.

Servants, drummers and guests alike all fell to their knees, following the reanimated corpses in prostrating themselves on the ground. Tom alone remained standing, concealment dissolved, and Aimée Valura's dark gaze bored into his as she set down the knife, lifted the searing cauldron, and poured the rest of the potion down her throat.

The effect was instantaneous and startling: her whole body quivered and convulsed; flames dancing wildly, drums starting up again with a vengeance.

 _"Come, great serpent spirit,"_ she hissed in a hoarse voice—lowering an octave with the Parseltongue, dark and suggestive. _"I am yours to be ridden."_

The gathering rose in one frenzied whole, as if entranced or hypnotized, and Tom felt an intoxicating rush of pure Dark energy crackle through the air and flow through his fractured soul. An edge of panic sparked within him—he would not be possessed by the Dark forces she had summoned with her ritual; would not be controlled by any Dark magic but his own.

The crowd around him was frenetic, feverish; tearing at their clothes as the music intensified, calling out to the serpent slithering around its mistress in a coiling dance. Tom was dizzy with the compulsion to join them; nearly faint with the effort of resisting the force urging him to move, to dance, to answer Zombi's hissing sibilation. Summoning up all his strength, he staggered backward—eyes flickering shut as he fell.

When he opened his eyes again, they were not his own.

He was coiled around Madame Valura—her warm body writhing beneath him; her bloody hand stroking his scales—and he felt calm and cold; vitalized with creeping clarity.

He was no longer possessed by the raw Dark energy she called _spirits_.

He was possessing her snake.

Her pupils, Tom saw as he rose to meet her face-to-face, had gone snake-like again themselves—and this time, he was certain he wasn't imagining it.

 _"Now,"_ he hissed with the python's forked tongue, _"I see why Violetta calls you the Queen of Death."_

Her slitted eyes flashed with surprise as she breathed, _"Thomas."_

Tom flicked out his tongue to lick the _veve_ paint on her cheek—only dimly aware now of the music, or the bonfire, or the resurrected dead, or the frenzied congregation dancing faster and faster all around them as he moved through the crowd on Madame Valura's shoulders. The world had narrowed in focus to her dark eyes, dark skin, Dark magic; that electrifying rush of power from her touch.

When they reached his uninhabited body, he looked down on himself unconscious through the serpent's eyes—thin and pale and fragile and so _human,_ lurching closer as Aimée knelt down to rip away the talisman around his throat.

Tom sat up with an asphyxiated gasp.

He was himself again, dizzied and dazed. The snake was slithering over his legs, and Aimée Valura's warm hands were ripping open his shirt to reveal Salazar's locket. When she reached for it with flashing hungry eyes, Tom seized her wrist, tightening his burning grip with magic until she hissed in pain.

 _"I think not,"_ he managed to spit out in Parseltongue, moving for his wand—but she had already pressed him down beneath her on the wet, warm soil of the swamp.

 _"So be it,"_ she hissed into his ear: Zombi snaking tight around them; locket digging into both their chests. There was a ferocious, feral look in the depths of her liquid eyes. For a single spellbound moment, she let her walls of Occlumency fall, and Tom could see himself reflected in her mind: that same _desire_ burning on his features; his own eyes flashing red.

Seizing her to him, he twisted aside—and Disapparated both of them back before the bloody altar, with Tom now seated on her throne.

The Queen of Death was straddling him and laughing—the serpent was uncoiling—the drumbeat was pounding down around them, devouring them both. Tom could taste the potion like Death on her tongue as their mouths crushed together once more. He swallowed it down, clinging desperately to some semblance of control as his blood and magic rose with hers—animated with the same Dark power threaded through their veins; each of them the farthest thing from Pure.

Heart racing wildly—head pounding like the drums—Tom released all restraint at last, and let himself sink deeper, deeper, deeper into the swirling black pools of her eyes.

The last thing he remembered, as he sank inside her, was a deadly eruption of Dark energy, blasting the dancers closest to the throne to pieces—dousing the fire with blood.

* * *

Tom was drowning.

Black-green storm waters churned around him—the color of putrefaction, like the ooze from a bloated corpse. The water was thick with decomposition and decay: all around him floated rotting dead men, skin flayed away to reveal bare muscle and pearly bone. One reached out a skeletal hand to touch his chest, and Tom woke with a sharp, strangled intake of breath.

He was on a bed, surrounded by silk and satin, and he was entirely unclothed.

A dozen panicked thoughts spun rapid-fire through his head and settled quickly on two words: _the locket._ It was gone.

As was his wand.

Tom threw himself up and out of the bed in a single fraction of a second, seizing one of the sheets and Transfiguring himself a robe. He was in an enormous bedchamber with white wooden floors and white brick walls—back, then, to Maison Blanche. A vanity near the bed was cluttered with scarves, paint, magical cosmetics... and several small jars of familiar enchanted white powder. Adding a pocket to the robe, he slipped one inside.

He was about to move to the open door when a flash of black in all that white caught his eye: a lock of hair that he recognized at once as his own.

A shadow fell over the doorway, and Tom looked up to see Madame Valura leaning against it in a white dressing gown, her head uncovered and entirely bare—bald. "Hair," she said softly, "is a powerful ingredient in _gris-gris."_ Her coral lips curved upward in a smirk. "You see why I have none."

Tom sent her flying across the room with a furious flick of his fingers—but before she slammed against the far wall, she raised a hand of her own, and he was spiraling fast back onto the bed: head hitting the headboard so hard he half-expected his skull to shatter. Silk wrapped itself around his wrists, tying him to the bedposts as Aimée climbed to her feet and stepped toward him, appearing delighted.

"You think you can challenge _me,_ without your wand?" She climbed over him on the bed with predatory grace, her movements almost serpentine. "Your kind grew dependent on a wooden stick to adequately perform even the simplest magic. My kind have never needed anything but our hands..." She grazed light fingers down his chest, leaving Tom's skin buzzing in their wake. "...our blood..." Her hand moved down, _down,_ stroking skillfully between his legs. "...our bodies."

And _there_ , Tom realized with the part of his brain not consumed by physical sensation, was the explanation for her wilder, looser magic; her lack of a wand or standard spellwork. African and Native magic had never required either—had never been constrained by Latin or _swish and flick_ until Europeans had forced those constraints on them, whittling down primordial Dark chaos into something safe. Controlled.

No wonder she was skeptical of Violetta's wand work; her hard-won place within the system that Aimée despised.

She wasn't _wrong,_ of course: centuries of reliance on wands as a tool for channeling and amplifying magic had ensured the majority of the British wizarding population wrote off large-scale wandless and non-verbal magic as rare, highly advanced skills, effectively impossible past childhood.

Tom had always taken pride in bending impossibilities to his will, but most people—needless to say—were not Tom.

He had the silk restraints unraveled in a flash, and Valura immobilized beneath him with nothing but his own magic. "I am rather unique among _my kind_ ," he breathed into her ear, one hand pinning her wrists above her head and the other slipping under her dressing gown to enact some torment of its own. "Now, where is my locket?"

"Ah," smiled Aimée Valura—letting out a sharp, pleased gasp as Tom twisted his fingers. _"Your_ talisman." Her restrained hands spread open, and Salazar's locket soared out from a drawer in the vanity, Summoned into her palms. He released her to seize it at once—then Summoned his wand as well. It flew out from beneath the satin pillows and into his outstretched hand.

Madame Valura laughed as Tom's jaw tightened, sitting up to touch the silken fabric of his makeshift robe. "Would you like to fetch your clothes as well, _mon cher_ , or shall we do away with them again entirely?"

"What I would _like,"_ Tom said through gritted teeth, "is to know what happened last night."

She smiled, moving to sit at the vanity. "The spirits came, of course—and so did you." She selected a purple handkerchief and wound it into a turban, ignoring Tom's flushed, incensed expression. "I did not remember, either, the first time I was ridden." She shrugged, tying the last knot of the headdress and reaching for her gold hoop earrings. "But I remember everything, now," she finished, meeting Tom's eyes in the mirror, "and you, _mon chéri..._ were magnificent."

Blurred, disjointed images flashed like lightning through Tom's memory: Leaning back against the high-backed throne and allowing her to ride him in an explosive, frenzied furor; bloodied, bruising, buzzing hands wrapped around each other's throats. The altar, drenched with fresh sacrificial blood from the dancers they had slaughtered. The python, coiling around him and tightening its grip on his chest. The bonfire, finally devouring the bodies she'd risen from the dead.

"Inferi," he said, breathless—struck with cold, clear understanding in the sober light of day. She had created Inferi. They were legendary, practically mythical, and the method was thought lost: no one had managed it in centuries, not even Grindelwald—and not for lack of trying. Mastering the art of raising the dead would mean a limitless supply of _undead soldiers that could not die..._

Except, apparently, by fire.

He leapt from the bed and strode to the vanity, lowering his voice; imploring. "What was in that potion?"

Madame Valura looked away from the mirror and opened the drawer where she'd placed his locket—taking out the snakewood knife. "The potion," she said softly, "matters less than this." Tom's breath had gone shallow: there was an engraved _S_ carved into the handle, matching the _S_ on his locket. "A gift," said Valura in a voice like velvet, "from my mother... and her mother... and _her_ mother. Do you know what the _S_ stands for?"

Tom pressed his lips together tightly, unable to look away from the spotted wood of the knife. The Ilvermorny tree in Violetta's mind appeared in his own— _made of snakewood,_ she'd said. If Salazar's wand had been—his fingers tightened on his own wand— _destroyed..._ but lived on, somehow, through that tree... He could hardly go to Ilvermorny without knowledge of his whereabouts reaching Dippet, and by extension Dumbledore, but who could tell what properties a knife carved from its wood might have?

Aimée was watching him closely, tilting her head to the side in an unsettling mirror of his own frequent movement. "Tell me," he said acidly, and she smiled.

"I am asking _you_ , Monsieur Gaunt." She traced the _S_ on the knife with one light finger, dark gaze on the locket hanging again around his neck. "It could stand for many names, _non?"_ Her eyes flitted up to his own again as she finished slyly, "Steward... Sayre... Slytherin."

Tom opened his mouth, then closed it again, hand closing tight around the locket.

Madame Valura rose with a hard glint in her eyes. "It is time, I think," she said, "to visit the city of the dead."

* * *

The vast stone necropolis of St. Louis Cemetery was a maze of crumbling crypts and marble monuments, rows upon rows of crosses and angels and tombs casting shadows as tall as the trees as Tom followed the Queen of Death through its narrow, winding paths.

"When the first _habitants_ of New Orleans dug graves," she told him coolly, "water floated corpses to the surface, caskets popping up with sucking sounds." She eyed him with amusement as he grimaced in distaste. "They built the tombs above ground, after that."

She bent down at an older, faded crypt, voluminous violet skirts fanning out around her as she reached into the satchel at her side and extracted an empty glass bottle. "But there are other ways to gather graveyard dust..." With a beckoning curl of her finger, grey dust that could only be powdered human remains poured out of the cracks in the crypt and into the bottle. Aimée held up a red bag of _gris-gris_ and sprinkled some inside. "...and other ways to bury, too."

Tom watched intently as she reached again and again into the satchel: mixing in black salt and some sort of animal bone; using the snakewood knife to puncture her finger and dripping in three drops of blood. The air around them was churning with Dark magic—this wasn't merely a collection of charms. This was a _curse_. And as the final ingredient was added, he understood.

"What did she do?" he asked slowly. Valura glanced up, having dropped the distinctive curly hair into the bag and tied it tight. "The girl with the golden eyes."

Aimée Valura closed both hands over the bag and murmured under her breath. Tom felt something smolder in the air. "It is what she _will_ do, Thomas," she answered finally, setting the finished cursed _gris-gris_ onto the soil around the tomb and pressing it down—covering it with dirt. "She seeks to take my throne. She would replace me, if I let her." A faint smile flickered across her lips as she brushed off her hands and stood. "I know her type."

 _There were queens before her, and there'll be queens after._

Not if she killed the competition.

A lurching figure appeared so suddenly around the corner of a nearby crypt that Tom drew his wand—thinking wildly, for a moment, that another of her Inferi had risen from the grave. But no. As the creature stumbled toward them, he saw that it was human: a dirty, limping Muggle tramp in tattered clothes, throwing himself at Aimée's feet and looking up at her in fearful awe, choking out, "Madame."

"Speak," Valura said in an ice-cold voice, looking down upon the pleading beggar with unsparing hauteur. "What is it that you want?"

"I'm dying, Madame," said the tramp, lifting a tattered sleeve to show her his paralyzed, atrophied arm. Some Muggle disease, Tom realized—polio, perhaps. He stepped back in revulsion. "They said you can help... They said you can save me... They said you'd be here." The diseased Muggle's desperate, watery eyes darted frantically around the cemetery as he finished in a whisper, "I don't want to die."

"We all die, _mon chéri,"_ the Queen of Death said softly, reaching down to encircle a glittering hand around her supplicant's limp wrist. "But not just yet."

Her magic coiled around him for a single shining second, then faded—and the Muggle stood on strong, straightened legs to raise his Healed, working arm: curling and uncurling it in wonder.

He had little time to celebrate the cure: Madame Valura seized his arm again a moment later, fingers now burning with a Darker sort of magic. "There is a price," she murmured, and the tramp cried out as the _veve_ of her serpent deity tattooed itself onto his bared skin. She pulled aside the neckline of her violet dress, revealing the same symbol burned into her left breast. Over her heart. "Serve me, as I serve the spirits," she said like an invocation, "and you will want for nothing, ever again." The Muggle nodded fervently, and Valura smiled. "So be it." She covered her breast and released his arm.

"Wait for me at the gates," she ordered as her newest henchman looked to her with shining, worshipful eyes. He bowed, then sprinted toward the cemetery entrance, jumping and whooping with joy.

Tom watched him go, then voiced the disbelieving question on his tongue. "You would turn a _Muggle_ into your servant?" Aimée raised a brow, and he amended, not knowing the American term, "An ordinary human, without magic."

"I am short two magic servants, thanks to you," she said—laughing shortly at the look on Tom's face. "My servants do not need magic, to sell me their souls."

Setting her clear lack of standards aside, Tom tilted his head. "Why not keep them, then, after bringing them back from the dead? Why destroy them in the fire?"

"I do not bring them back," she said sharply. "The body and the soul are separate—you have seen this, now, yourself." Tom felt a remembered thrill: projecting what remained of his soul to possess the python; slithering and seeing through its eyes. Far more pleasant than the process of extracting it in pieces.

There were now four pieces of himself contained in objects—were they able to project themselves, too, temporarily leaving those objects in the way he had left his body?

He would have to try possessing humans next.

"I release their souls to the spirit world, once their service is ended," Valura was continuing. "There are other methods of enslaving the dead, of stealing the soul before it can pass on, trapping it in this mortal realm forever... Those are not my methods. I would not anger the spirits in that way."

The _spirits._ Tom suppressed a scoff. The forces she worshipped and summoned and allowed to consume her were nothing but Dark matter: the primal magic that all witchcraft and wizardry originated from, the chaotic energy that was harnessed and shaped into spells. There was no ethical balance to the Dark fabric of the universe. There were laws of magic, but not _moral_ laws. There was only pure, raw power.

Angering the spirits, suffice to say, was not high on Tom's list of concerns.

"You are skeptical," she said, assessing him with that penetrating dark stare, "but you do not know the spirit world, as I do." She walked forward through the tombs, beckoning for Tom to follow. "There is this world, and the world of the dead, with a threshold in between. I have moved across that threshold—beneath the water, we call it in _vodou_ —to the place where the spirits and the _ancêtres_ reside."

Tom felt a shiver pass over him. To pass through the borderlands between life and Death... Not even with his Horcruxes would he ever attempt such a thing. They existed, after all, to tether him to the land of the living. "How?" he heard himself demand, voice sounding faint to his ears.

Madame Valura was silent a long moment, trailing her gaze along the endless rows of tombs. "It is possible to open the gates, with the right offering and the right vessel," she said at last—adding with a canny look at Tom, "Snakes are travelers between the realms themselves, _mon cher._ I would think our shared _ancêtre_ knew that."

Tom caught his breath. She had acknowledged it, admitted it—had finally given voice to the theory he knew in his blood to be true; had _made_ it true by speaking it aloud.

Before he could say a word, she stopped, and raised a silencing hand.

They had arrived at a weathered white crypt, surrounded on all sides by candles, flowers, coins... cloth puppets, wooden dolls... feathers, roots, and bones. The tomb itself was covered in Xs, painted in threes and carved into the stone.

The name of its occupant was written on a large brass plaque: _Marie Laveau. 1801—1881._

The woman whose portrait hung above the grand staircase of Maison Blanche. The first _vodou_ queen of New Orleans.

"She watches, from the spirit world," Valura said, so quietly Tom strained to hear. "The more who come to her and leave her offerings, the more appeased her soul becomes."

Everyone—however strong or powerful—had a weakness. An insecurity; an emotion or a need or a secret. A gap in the castle wall.

Whatever Marie Laveau meant to Aimée Valura, Tom sensed with keen sharp surety, she was that weak spot.

"She had a daughter, of the same name," Aimée added. Tom tore his gaze away from the shrine, but she wasn't looking at him—she was running her fingers across the smattering of Xs on the tomb, leaving three new ones in their wake. "Colder than her mother, crueler—she preferred to be feared, not loved. The first Marie died of a sudden sickness. They said the second killed her with a _vodou_ curse, to take her place."

"Your predecessor, I presume." Madame Valura smiled, but said nothing. A perplexing dissonance was nagging at him, pressing on the back of his skull. "How did she die?" asked Tom. "The second Marie Laveau."

"She drowned in a storm on Lake Pontchartrain," Valura answered with that same uncanny smile, and Tom chilled—watery corpses floating across his vision. "Some say she still walked the streets of New Orleans, decades after."

Given the Queen of Death's taste for Inferi, thought Tom, she probably _did_.

"There is a story, about the founder of Ilvermorny. Isolt Sayre." Tom turned, slow and wary, to meet Aimée Valura's liquid eyes. "She came here on a ship, like my enslaved _ancêtres_ , but a ship of her own choosing—with a name she chose for herself."

"Elias Story," breathed Tom. Isolt's Mayflower passage was a centuries-old forgotten historical footnote, buried in the annals of British wizarding records—but still very much alive, it seemed, in the faraway land she'd stolen away to. The presence of this passing detail in an obscure genealogical text had originally sparked Tom's notion of creating an anagram alias.

Rapidly, it all made sense.

He looked back at the tomb, focusing intently on those grand carved letters—rearranging them in an instant in his mind.

 _Marie Laveau.  
_ _Aimée Valura._

She, too, then, had reshaped a murdered parent's mirror-name into something freshly feared.

She, too, had discarded the identity forced upon her and fashioned a new persona out of symbols and blood.

She had staged her death, and resurrected herself as someone else.

"Marie Laveau," he said aloud, "still lives and reigns, it seems."

At his side, the current _vodou_ queen of New Orleans released a low, cool sigh. "What comes first," said the woman who called herself Madame Valura, following Tom's gaze back to that weathered crypt, "always appears better than what comes after. You must accomplish double the achievements of a famous _ancêtre_ to outshine them. You must gain power by shining in your own way." She glanced back at him, unreadable. "But you know that already, I think."

"When," Tom said quietly, "did the second Marie Laveau die?"

A ghost of a smile passed over her coral lips. "A decade after her mother. She was sixty-four years old." And 1891, Tom finished silently, was nearly sixty years ago. The woman at his side was older than Hepzibah Smith, older than Violetta Beauvais, older than Albus Dumbledore—a full century older than Tom.

What uncanny Dark glamour, what sacrificial spell or bargain with her so-called spirits, what unfathomable _vodou_ magic, could keep a 123-year-old witch looking hardly a day over thirty?

"I have toyed with the spirit world too long, you see. It calls to me." There was a wistful kind of yearning in her voice, now, as she stared at her mother's tomb. "Standing at the crossroads between realms... being ridden, through Zombi... it would be so easy, to slip beneath the water and never return to the surface. To allow myself to stay." She shook her head. "Food, drink, pleasure... all of it is ruined for me. Nothing in this mortal world compares, once you have tasted the divine."

Tom thought of the old stories: faerie feasts that vanished, leaving mortal visitors hungrier than ever; beautiful maidens that were crones disguised—illusions.

Aimée Valura—Marie Laveau—was _mad_ , he realized with a shivering tremor of clarity. What else but delusion, to view Death as somehow sacred? To long for it, to yearn for it? To see it as divine?

"But now," she was saying, "there is you." Tom's eyes snapped from the crypt to find her gazing at him with a different sort of yearning. "You make me remember... how it feels, what it means, to be alive. I feel the Dark inside you and I know it as I know my own." Parseltongue coiled through his ears and made his blood surge in his veins. _"No one in a century has understood."_

She stepped forward, closing the space between them, and traced a warm finger down Tom's cheekbone. His skin throbbed where she touched it. "Stay with me," she whispered. "Be my _compagnon_ —my consort."

Tom traced the _veve_ on her firm, full breast, hissing, _"You already have a consort."_

The Queen of Death laughed softly. _"Zombi is the type to share."_ She moved her mouth along Tom's jaw until it hovered over his lips. "Imagine," she breathed, "all that we could be together—how terrible, how great."

For a moment, Tom envisioned it: the two of them enthroned. Invincible and insatiable; murderous and merciless; none daring to speak their names. Sharing knowledge and servants and serpents, sharing Salazar's blood, sharing... power.

The vision dissolved into shadow.

Tom, unlike Zombi, was not the sharing type.

He met her lips with his own, bodies again entwining in an incendiary embrace. "I am yours, my queen," he murmured, flicking a tongue out into her ear and feeling her shiver in pleasure as his magic reached unnoticed, shadow-like, into the satchel at her side. "You have given me your true name," Tom said, one hand trailing down her back as the other magically extracted the bottle of graveyard dust and the snakewood knife. "Will you have mine, as well?"

She grinned, alight with triumph—black eyes fixed on his, and sparkling like stars. _"Yes."_

 _"Voldemort,"_ he whispered in her ear. The knife and bottle both slid into the pocket of his trousers, joining the already-stolen jar of enchanted white powder. Slowly—locking eyes with Valura—he reached a hand inside.

"Voldemort," _la reine de la mort_ repeated. Tom inhaled, savoring the sound of hearing her speak it aloud: the name fit like an elegant incantation on her tongue, perfectly pronounced and enunciated. " _Vol de mort..._ " She tilted her head with a slight smile. " _Vol_ has two meanings, _mon chéri_ _:_ theft, and flight. Theft of death, or flight from death? Do you steal, or do you flee?"

Tom lifted the open jar. _"Both."_

Her powder hit true and strong: the Queen of Death inhaled a surprised, soft sigh and crumbled to the ground, collapsing unconscious in a heap of violet and velvet before Marie Laveau's tomb.

He left her laid out like a corpse, and quickly found the cemetery entrance—enlivened with a euphoric sense of purpose.

The Muggle tramp was pacing by the gates, stroking the stars and serpents on his arm. He looked up as Tom's shadow fell over him, and drew one final breath before the Killing Curse hit his heart.

* * *

On Apparating back to the bayous of Lake Pontchartrain, Tom saw no trace of last night's celebrations: the beaches were emptied of skulls or drums or wood, and the green waters were as still and silent as the trees. Beneath the hanging moss of an enormous cypress—shielded from the view of any passing creatures of the swamp—he carefully removed the locket from around his neck and set it on the ground beside the body of his latest victim.

 _Killing rips the soul apart._

Tom had killed so many times, in the seven years since hearing Horace Slughorn speak those words, that he sometimes wondered when the day would come that his soul would finally be so tattered that he could no longer rip it at all.

Today was not that day.

By now, the process of preparing a new Horcrux was familiar, almost soothing. He murmured the spell to initiate the ritual, and opened the dead tramp's mouth to magically extract a stream of blood from within the body—replacing the contents of the small jar that had been filled with white powder. He had perfected this method of drawing out blood from a victim long before paying his father a visit: it left no visible trace, no outward mark on the corpse. Clean. Elegant. Efficient.

There was no need to be so circumspect with his own flesh.

The snakewood knife felt as fitting beneath his fingers as the locket felt when worn around his throat. He brought it down in a sharp slicing arc on the palm of his hand, and drained an equal amount of blood into the jar: swirling his blood and the murdered tramp's together before swallowing them both. The blood that remained in the jar was poured over the locket, sinking into the metal with a hiss.

Minutes later, it was done: he had anchored his physical body to the object with his own blood, and his victim's. It was ready and waiting to house the newest fragment of his soul.

He could now begin the final, far more arduous step of the process: forcing that piece of splintered soul out from his body and into the prepared receptacle.

Setting aside his wand and bracing himself with a deep, calming breath, Tom spoke the incantation.

Dark magic scoured through him in a pulverizing rush, bending his extremities in on themselves and sucking in his limbs—he was compressing his own body; crushing himself from within. Blood poured from his nose, his mouth, his ears, his eyes: broken arteries and torn retinas, gushing out in screaming streams of red as Tom hurled up chunks of muscle and sinew onto the dirt as a raw, bloodied mass of gore.

 _Thine eyes shall become like blood,_ _and thou shalt vomit forth thy flesh._

Quite the quaint little picture of extreme self-mutilation, Owle Bullock had painted in _Secrets of the Darkest Art—_ a picture he had evidently felt no desire to recreate himself.

Dark wizards throughout the centuries had perfected the art of torture, creating and refining an incalculable number of ways to magically break the human body, but very few in history had been willing to go to such lengths of enacting drastic bodily harm on _themselves_.

Or at least—few, if any, had survived an initial attempt to do so.

Tom would never forget the agony and terror of his first Horcrux; would always remember exactly how close he had come to Death, to hurling out all his internal organs onto his father's dining room floor (Scouring every drop of blood from the carpet, after, had been almost as challenging as the ritual itself). He had cast Healing spell after Healing spell in a desperate simultaneous frenzy, only replenishing enough blood and strength to keep himself alive and in excruciating torment, holding the ritual enchantment in place all the while. The smallest error—the slightest loss of control or lack of skill—and the soul-expunging ritual would have failed, if his heart had not failed first.

Sixteen-year-old Tom, unlike countless Dark wizards before him, had not failed.

And now—immortal four times over—keeping himself alive was no longer a problem.

Every atom in his eviscerated body was screaming, _shattering,_ splinterizing like a corporeal version of the Muggles' city-crushing bomb. Unable to see or hear through the blood in his eyes and ears, Tom dimly felt his spine _snap_ as the newest fragment of his soul arced out of him in a final cataclysmic expulsion, soaring through his throat and out of his mouth alongside one last hurl of blood.

When he shuddered back into consciousness, the world had gone black.

Tom reached up a trembling hand to wipe dried blood from his aching eyes, certain, for a moment, that he'd finally permanently blinded them—but no. However long he'd been unconscious—however long his Horcruxes had needed to repair the lethal bodily damage he'd just inflicted for a fifth time—it had been long enough for the sun to sink below the horizon, leaving the swamp cold and dark. Hours, then—four or five, perhaps. The toll truly did grow steeper every time.

Forcing himself up on shaking, aching limbs, he grasped for the locket.

It came alive beneath his fingers: practically leaping into his hand; humming and burning to the touch. When he opened it, his own dark, unbloodied eyes stared back at him, and Tom gasped out a rasping laugh of exultation.

His fifth Horcrux was completed.

Salazar's locket, now, could be safely stored like the rest—kept hidden in a warded suitcase for the remainder of this journey, like the diary and diadem locked away back in his Le Pavillon hotel room. On return to England, though... this particular Horcrux was deserving of a particularly distinguished hiding place, with particularly distinctive guardians.

Tom had exactly the solution in mind.

The Muggle body lay where he'd left it, mouth still gaping open in what looked like stunned surprise. Replacing the beating locket over his own heart and leaning over to seize the knife, Tom plunged it deep into the tramp's unmoving chest, then spread the graveyard dust he'd stolen over the fresher corpse's lips and eyes.

 _"Rise,"_ he hissed in Parseltongue, summoning up all the ancestral magical properties of that wand-turned-knife, all the sacrificial power of the powdered corpse, all the forceful Dark _intent_ at his command.

No other Dark wizards had managed it in centuries, but no other Dark wizards were Tom.

His magic simmered and smoldered through the air, coiled into the corpse like crackling flame, and sparked to life within stilled veins. When the tramp's eyes snapped open, they were clouded over in a dead white haze. Tom's first Inferius sat up, bent to its knees, and bowed.

Tom sat, for a long exhilarating moment, simply soaking in the triumph: feeling the heady, incomparable high of having cheated Death not once, but _twice,_ feeling endless, infinite, _divine._

There would be time, later, to perfect the process—to experiment with different runes and different resurrective potions; different uses for the knife; different means of trapping the soul before it could leave the body; different ways to make his immortal soldiers invincible to fire. It would take time, but _time_ was something Tom had more of than anyone else in the world.

He stood, and directed the reanimated corpse over to the water of the lake. Commanding it was like commanding a puppet, similar to the Imperius in tone, if not complexity—without the need for sustained, individualized attention. He could easily envision summoning up a mindless hoard of them and unleashing them as one, wholly secure in the knowledge that they would obey with every rotting cell in their undead bodies.

 _This_ undead body could rot here forever, for all he cared—its purpose had already been served.

Bending down, he forced it into the murky swamp waters, watching as it disappeared below the surface and left the mirror-like moonlit lake appearing calm and undisturbed.

Then Tom found his own gaze in the water, and his breath caught at once in his throat.

The whites of his eyes were now so bloodshot they could hardly be called _white_ any longer, with rims of red around the dark irises that he suspected were there to stay: retinal hemorrhages, he supposed, could only be magically repaired so many times without leaving visible traces. His nose was thinner, sharper—bent in on itself one time too many—and his cheekbones were so hollowed as to be nearly skeletal. The bone structure of his face seemed blurred and somehow distorted, as if the Dark magic that had smoothed over all those broken blood vessels again and again had finally been forced to recreate a facsimile of his former facial features. A mask.

He looked less like his father than ever.

Tom lifted a thin, long-fingered hand, holding it up to the moonlight—his skin was paler than he'd even thought possible, white as bone: practically bloodless.

Once more, he would empty himself of blood. Once more, he would replenish himself with magic.

And after, there would be none of that original Muggle blood left in him at all.

Tom thought fleetingly of all who had craved him, through the years, all whose desires he had avoided or exploited: an endless cascade of women and men alike regarding him greedily, _hungrily,_ as if he were a feast they could devour, lusting after the same striking, symmetrical face and graceful, well-formed body that had ensnared his mother.

He would continue to contort that perfect Muggle face into a macabre magical mask, would keep shredding that perfect Muggle body into a mutilated magical monstrosity, until there was nothing left to inspire desire: only horror, and terror. A new kind of perfection.

And any strange, power-hungry soul who might still want him, after that—after he had finally shed the last of his father's skin and, serpent-like, remade himself anew— _well_. Better to be wanted for his power, than for an ordinary dead man's extraordinary beauty.

Power was the only thing Tom wanted, after all.

A piercing _crack_ behind him tore through the eerie silence of the swamp. Tom stood, and slowly turned.

The Queen of Death took in the scene with raging cold fury—her emptied bottle of graveyard dust; the bloodied snakewood knife; the gory mass of flesh and blood—and landed at last on Tom: eyes widening, lips tightening, taking a step back in shock.

"So this," she said at last in a voice as sharp-edged as her knife, "is the face beneath the _façade."_

Tom smiled his most threatening smile and drew his wand. "Shall we see yours, as well?"

She sent the knife whirling fast through the air and into his heart before he could take a step forward—Tom staggered backward, nearly falling into the lake. Madame Valura's eyes shone with triumph... then widened again in horror.

Tom had ripped it out again and stopped the bleeding at once. "You're hardly the first," he told her coolly, "to stab me in the heart."

She stepped back again as he stepped forward, wand and knife in hand—reaching with shaking fingers into her satchel and pulling out another cursed red bag of _gris-gris_.

"I curse you, _Voldemort,"_ she spat in a thick, harsh voice, "in the name of the spirit you have stolen. May your spirit be ripped from your own body. May you subsist for years upon years without strength or salvation or sustenance. May you destroy yourself as you destroy others." With a hard, sharp smile of her own, she dropped in the final ingredient: that stolen lock of his hair. Dark energy crackled through the air around her hands. _"So be—"_

She cut off as the bag fell, spilling out on the swamp's bloody ritual ground.

Tom had sliced open her throat.

Blood poured over her chest in a red gush, darkening the violet bodice of her dress to black as her skin cracked and caved; her face wilted and wrinkled; her entire body shrank and shriveled with age—a century of life visible at last on her physical form.

Tom lifted her with magic, and lowered her dying, convulsing body into the lake. As his Inferius rose up to seize her, he opened his bloodied mouth to speak to her in Parseltongue one final time.

 _"Tell the spirit world that Voldemort sends his regards."_

There was a faint smile frozen on her withered lips as she sank beneath the water, pulled down into the depths by the undead.

Tom watched until the last ripples on the lake had settled back to deathly stillness—until the only sound or motion in the swamp was the soft swaying of the cypress trees in the midsummer breeze, sounding like nothing so much as a hiss.

* * *

 **NOTES**

 _Vodou_ as presented here is a conglomeration of real-life practices known under a variety of names: Haitian _vodou_ , Louisiana Creole voodoo, African-American hoodoo, and African _vodun_ , all of which are still practiced in some form today. The traditions in this chapter are all adapted from documentations of real-life rituals or ceremonies and worked into the Potterverse rules of magic. Voldemort is the only wizard shown capable, in the books, of possessing humans and animals alike—and every variation on _vodou_ has a long tradition of spirit possession. The color associated with evil in voodoo is red, and a practitioner possessed by evil spirits really is said to have red eyes.

The 19th-century voodoo queen Marie Laveau—said to have been 1/3 African, 1/3 Native American, and 1/3 white—really did have a daughter of the same name, who had a pet python named Zombi, continued her mother's operations out of Maison Blanche, and was still spotted around New Orleans decades after her supposed death by drowning in Lake Pontchartrain... but her anagram alias of Aimée Valura is entirely made up.

Although Isolt Sayre's Squib daughter, Martha Steward, married a Native American man and lived as a Muggle/No-Maj, Rowling does not state whether she and her husband had children—but if they did, it's not at all outside the realm of possibility that the magical (and Parselmouth) gene would have eventually resurfaced in one or more of their descendants.

For non-American readers who may not be aware, Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation and outlawing interracial relationships were very much still in effect in 1950 (though the racial demographics of New Orleans ensured that people of color had a measure of freedom in their businesses and social interactions not found in other parts of the South). The parallels with magical America's segregation law seem obvious.

Rowling said on Pottermore that she conceptualized Inferi as a simplified twist on _vodou_ zombies with fewer cultural associations, so this is me playing with that. It is also worth noting that the Inferi that Voldemort eventually created for the purpose of guarding the locket Horcrux are stated to have been mainly "vagrant, homeless Muggles".

The murder used to turn the locket into a Horcrux was stated to have been a "Muggle tramp". To date, Rowling's only description of the Horcrux creation process has been: "I think it would be naive not to think that people have been trying [to make a Horcrux] for a long time, and thought they succeeded and hadn't, or else maim themselves or kill themselves in the attempt. It's such a dangerous thing to do. I see it as a series of things you would have to do. So you would have to perform a spell. But you would also—I don't even know if I want to say it out loud." My interpretation of the ritual is therefore entirely speculative.


End file.
